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The world gets hacked because programmers make mistakes, and their management cannot evaluate those mistakes -- if only for no other reason that sometimes it is

by geocar 9y ago

The world gets hacked because programmers make mistakes, and their management cannot evaluate those mistakes -- if only for no other reason that sometimes it isn't even obvious they made a mistake until a couple years later. Users have been fooled: Turn it off and on, is a reasonable and well-known troubleshooting guide, but nobody blames the software vendor. If I'm on the phone with a company and they tell me to turn it off and on, I can't even point out "so you sent me something defective?" this is normal folks. Maybe we need to teach programming younger and younger -- and it'll take two or three generations to become common enough that management will actually understand what I'm doing. Or maybe we need awareness campaigns to keep users from putting up with shit experiences! Or maybe someone has some other idea, but the major barrier exists: We don't know how to program computers, and saying that out loud makes a lot of people with the job-title (or description) of programmer clam right up.

sfilargi 9y ago
You are dead wrong in everything. To start with, your analogy is bad. You cannot compare psychical items with software. When you buy a car do you expect it to run and last forever? Software does, so you can see immediately that it's not a good analogy. Large systems are extremely complex but even so we have process, tools and methods to build reliable, verifiable and bug free code. What is stopping us from using them for every piece of software is the cost. Consumers are happy with the status quo of quality/cost.
- geocar 9y ago
  > Consumers are happy with the status quo of quality/cost. Consumers cannot understand the cost because they are not programmers. I don't understand the rest of your post. I'm not making an analogy to any psychical [sic?] items, physical items, or any other kinds of items.
  - qb45 9y ago
    Maybe not exactly "cannot", but they often don't because the really big costs of shit software are rarely paid and to many users it hasn't happened yet, so it is easy to miss them until you find all of your files encrypted by ransomware and suddenly need to figure out this new bitcoin thing.
    - geocar 9y ago
      I think that's exactly the definition of "cannot".
      - qb45 9y ago
        I think I could point you to a dictionary at this point but let's agree on "it's sufficiently hard and unlikely that in practice they pretty much effectively cannot" :)
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  > When you buy a car do you expect it to run and last forever? Software does, so you can see immediately that it's not a good analogy. 1. Software currently has a lot shorter life expectancy than physical items, due to how fast ecosystem changes (bitrot). SaaS model shortens that even further. 2. In fact, as a consumer, I'd expect a car to last a lifetime, if properly maintained. That I can't is a testament to throwaway economy we've created.
  - falcolas 9y ago
    > if properly maintained That maintenance is not free, in terms of both money and time. Anecdote time: the most maintainable vehicle I had the displeasure to own required a yearly investment of several dozen hours to grease the multitude of bearings via zerks located all throughout the chassis. The seats wore out, the heating system sprung a leak, consumables were consumed... all were fixable, but only when given an appropriate application of money and time. Sure, that truck is still running to this day, but very rarely used - because it's simply 2-3x less fuel efficient than a newer (but still 5 years old) vehicle, and the cost-benefit ratio of maintaining it is far too high. How much money are we willing to put into the maintenance of software? Reading through the comments of this thread - very little. If we were interested in paying, you can be fairly sure there would be a player in the industry willing to make those fixes for an appropriately large amount of money - commensurate with the time and effort required to understand and fix a 45M line codebase.

by geocar 9y ago

sfilargi 9y ago

You are dead wrong in everything. To start with, your analogy is bad. You cannot compare psychical items with software. When you buy a car do you expect it to run and last forever? Software does, so you can see immediately that it's not a good analogy. Large systems are extremely complex but even so we have process, tools and methods to build reliable, verifiable and bug free code. What is stopping us from using them for every piece of software is the cost. Consumers are happy with the status quo of quality/cost.

geocar 9y ago
> Consumers are happy with the status quo of quality/cost. Consumers cannot understand the cost because they are not programmers. I don't understand the rest of your post. I'm not making an analogy to any psychical [sic?] items, physical items, or any other kinds of items.
- qb45 9y ago
  Maybe not exactly "cannot", but they often don't because the really big costs of shit software are rarely paid and to many users it hasn't happened yet, so it is easy to miss them until you find all of your files encrypted by ransomware and suddenly need to figure out this new bitcoin thing.
  - geocar 9y ago
    I think that's exactly the definition of "cannot".
    - qb45 9y ago
      I think I could point you to a dictionary at this point but let's agree on "it's sufficiently hard and unlikely that in practice they pretty much effectively cannot" :)
TeMPOraL 9y ago
> When you buy a car do you expect it to run and last forever? Software does, so you can see immediately that it's not a good analogy. 1. Software currently has a lot shorter life expectancy than physical items, due to how fast ecosystem changes (bitrot). SaaS model shortens that even further. 2. In fact, as a consumer, I'd expect a car to last a lifetime, if properly maintained. That I can't is a testament to throwaway economy we've created.
- falcolas 9y ago
  > if properly maintained That maintenance is not free, in terms of both money and time. Anecdote time: the most maintainable vehicle I had the displeasure to own required a yearly investment of several dozen hours to grease the multitude of bearings via zerks located all throughout the chassis. The seats wore out, the heating system sprung a leak, consumables were consumed... all were fixable, but only when given an appropriate application of money and time. Sure, that truck is still running to this day, but very rarely used - because it's simply 2-3x less fuel efficient than a newer (but still 5 years old) vehicle, and the cost-benefit ratio of maintaining it is far too high. How much money are we willing to put into the maintenance of software? Reading through the comments of this thread - very little. If we were interested in paying, you can be fairly sure there would be a player in the industry willing to make those fixes for an appropriately large amount of money - commensurate with the time and effort required to understand and fix a 45M line codebase.