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Are you arguing for self-taught doctors to practice their quackery, then? Shall we accept freelance surgeons having out gall bladder and appendixes with whatev

Are you arguing for self-taught doctors to practice their quackery, then? Shall we accept freelance surgeons having out gall bladder and appendixes with whatever whiskey, x-acto knife, needle and thread they have at-hand? What exactly are you arguing for here? Obviously, humans are imperfect and corrupt - but you can impose some order and ethics and error correction into any community when you get organized. OP said one of the creators of Etherium was responsible for the bug, how much more 'expert' can you get? The problem is one of programmer craft, or the lack thereof.

aianus 9y ago
My point is that your suggestion is unlikely to have helped prevent this specific incident or others like it. A guild or professional association keeps quacks and idiots out, it doesn't solve the problem of experienced competent people occasionally making subtle mistakes.
- EdSharkey 9y ago
  Ok, you're saying that a guild won't prevent human error, especially in something intricate like software development. But there are actual historical examples that run counter to your claim. Other disciplines DO have error correcting standards and practices that catch and prevent errors from flowing downstream. Architects and accountants for example, have such well-established standards that those standards got codified into laws in most countries. I suspect that you believe that software development is not, or cannot ever be, an engineering discipline for reasons. Thing is, you might not be able to imagine software development can be treated as an engineering discipline, but that doesn't stop others from trying to. And if lawmakers decide to get involved, then 'trying' suddenly becomes 'doing', whether you think that's proper or not. Regarding 'subtle mistakes', do you consider performing an eval() on an unvalidated input string in the context of someone else's publicly addressable wallet a subtle mistake? Check out all of the definitions of 'ethics' in the dictionary and then try to say the developers who wrote the original buggy code and the white hats who did the damage control were acting ethically. How deep does the corruption go? Is Etherium corrupt down to first principles and all its founders morally bankrupt? One of the things a guild does is codify ethical standards for the group, and that is something all software developers sorely need. We are, I would argue, the most important group of workers on the planet today. Shouldn't we get our act together and mature as a discipline?

aianus 9y ago

My point is that your suggestion is unlikely to have helped prevent this specific incident or others like it. A guild or professional association keeps quacks and idiots out, it doesn't solve the problem of experienced competent people occasionally making subtle mistakes.

EdSharkey 9y ago
Ok, you're saying that a guild won't prevent human error, especially in something intricate like software development. But there are actual historical examples that run counter to your claim. Other disciplines DO have error correcting standards and practices that catch and prevent errors from flowing downstream. Architects and accountants for example, have such well-established standards that those standards got codified into laws in most countries. I suspect that you believe that software development is not, or cannot ever be, an engineering discipline for reasons. Thing is, you might not be able to imagine software development can be treated as an engineering discipline, but that doesn't stop others from trying to. And if lawmakers decide to get involved, then 'trying' suddenly becomes 'doing', whether you think that's proper or not. Regarding 'subtle mistakes', do you consider performing an eval() on an unvalidated input string in the context of someone else's publicly addressable wallet a subtle mistake? Check out all of the definitions of 'ethics' in the dictionary and then try to say the developers who wrote the original buggy code and the white hats who did the damage control were acting ethically. How deep does the corruption go? Is Etherium corrupt down to first principles and all its founders morally bankrupt? One of the things a guild does is codify ethical standards for the group, and that is something all software developers sorely need. We are, I would argue, the most important group of workers on the planet today. Shouldn't we get our act together and mature as a discipline?