3 ms·

Sure, but that's because of safety necessity, not because of optimal solution. If building bridges, powerstations, cranes, etc etc were essentially free outside

• jacquesm 10y ago
  Software is rapidly becoming just as critical, and at some point may be more critical. The ability to copy a product is a thing that works to your advantage after you've created it, the fact that each bridge and each building is engineered with slowly changing techniques and standards is what makes engineering a solid profession. I think that we probably have had too much change in too short a time thrown at us in the software related professions, if our hardware and other engineered products would perform at the same reliability level and with the same degree of resource consumption that our software routinely gets away with - not even looking at the risks associated with deploying crappy software - we would have returned the product to the manufacturer. But somehow we've collectively managed to convince our customers that this is the best we can do and that there is no honor in going slower but safer. This is all fine until software becomes critical to our survival, and we're definitely passing some threshold in that respect and as an industry I don't think we are ready to accept that responsibility without making some major changes in how we go about our daily work.