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My hunch is that the trend over the next decade or two is going to become an increasingly strong emphasis on software correctness. As software becomes more and

My hunch is that the trend over the next decade or two is going to become an increasingly strong emphasis on software correctness. As software becomes more and more intertwined in every aspect of our lives the stakes just keep getting higher and higher. And as "cyberspace" emerges more and more as a primary theater for international political struggles vulnerabilities are going to be that much more expensive and dangerous. I don't think there are any easy answers here but I expect to see a move over time to languages and tools that leave less room for error than the tools we commonly use now. C/C++ and dynamic languages like Javascript, Python and Ruby will be sidelined in favor of languages that provide more compile time guarantees of their behavior.

igor47 10y ago
I see the opposite happening. Remember when it was a big deal that a company was hacked and leaked user data? Or when a bunch of credit card numbers were stolen from a retailer? It feels like that's happened so often by now that it's not even surprising anymore. I expect that any retailer I use has been, is, or will be 0wn3d at some point. Moreover, the tech industry is solidifying. Larger companies are becoming more entrenched, and it seems harder for new companies to start clean with a fresh stack. This is the most tenuous part of my argument -- maybe it's not true? If the above is true, then I expect software quality to worsen over time. Large companies will not be rewriting huge parts of their stacks for any reason. The legacy systems will continue to balloon as they are inflated with new features, and morph as they are merged with the systems of acquired companies. Also, the original engineers deeply familiar with the systems will retire, and new maintenance programmers will have even less context into the big-picture of operations. Also, as the surface area of software increases, there will be more and more places for bugs and security problems to occur, even while those bugs affect more people and in more critical ways. I predict that over time, we will begin regarding software which routinely works as much as a pipe dream as software which is secure. This is a fundamentally pessimistic perspective. I'd love to hear an opposing argument.
codemusings 10y ago
Except this outage might not have had anything to do with their software. Maybe it was a technical failure and their lack of redundancy made it impossible to switch to a backup system.
deleted 10y ago
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igor47 10y ago

I see the opposite happening. Remember when it was a big deal that a company was hacked and leaked user data? Or when a bunch of credit card numbers were stolen from a retailer? It feels like that's happened so often by now that it's not even surprising anymore. I expect that any retailer I use has been, is, or will be 0wn3d at some point. Moreover, the tech industry is solidifying. Larger companies are becoming more entrenched, and it seems harder for new companies to start clean with a fresh stack. This is the most tenuous part of my argument -- maybe it's not true? If the above is true, then I expect software quality to worsen over time. Large companies will not be rewriting huge parts of their stacks for any reason. The legacy systems will continue to balloon as they are inflated with new features, and morph as they are merged with the systems of acquired companies. Also, the original engineers deeply familiar with the systems will retire, and new maintenance programmers will have even less context into the big-picture of operations. Also, as the surface area of software increases, there will be more and more places for bugs and security problems to occur, even while those bugs affect more people and in more critical ways. I predict that over time, we will begin regarding software which routinely works as much as a pipe dream as software which is secure. This is a fundamentally pessimistic perspective. I'd love to hear an opposing argument.

codemusings 10y ago

Except this outage might not have had anything to do with their software. Maybe it was a technical failure and their lack of redundancy made it impossible to switch to a backup system.

deleted 10y ago

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