8 ms·

Then the crew changing the lights would need a second checklist. The chance that they apply that wrong one to a regular intersection is not negligible.

• iopq 10y ago
  If they're empty to begin with, new ones shouldn't be put in. How hard is that?
  • germanier 10y ago
    It's harder than it looks. I see two possible interpretations of your proposal: a) Not change the worker's checklist. That would mean they should deviate from the list, creating a dangerous precedent. b) Adding another rule to the worker's checklist. Great, now they need to check this for every single light they are working on, which means more work (is that really cheaper than the bulbs even if it's only a few seconds per light?) and more possibilities of doing mistakes. Not to mention that the traffic light probably refuses to turn on when not all lights are installed. That means the software needs to be changed. Yet another possibility to introduce fatal mistakes at other intersections. I prefer paying for a bulb every now and then to putting human lives at risk. Note that changing something for this intersection means changing things for all intersections, including high-traffic complex ones.
  • golergka 10y ago
    If a variable is a null, you can assume that it should be null - but what if it became null as an error? We can put in a special code to check that, of course, and put in more branching in already complicated codebase. Or we could admit that these two objects wasting space are quite an acceptable price to pay, relative to the scale of the system and of the price of adding additional logic to it, which always equals instability and defects.