3 ms·

>Sure... but define "correctness". How about this, for example: The patient lives.

jerf 8y ago
A nice snarky reply. But I would put $10 down that if I asked you to assert that all medical software in current use that has never killed a patient because of its software issues is therefore "correct", you'd walk back hard. You'd have to be crazy to assert that all such software is "correct". Unless you are willing to make that assertion, you don't really mean that as a definition. This is also an example of what I mean in my cousin message about the temptation to turn this into a discussion about attention-grabbing bugs. But my framework already encompasses that. Software that kills patients is software very high on the costs side. There's a complicated discussion to be had about how to exactly quantify probabilities of failure vs. cost, but you can't have that discussion if you're stuck in a "correct or not correct" mindset.
- rhapsodic 8y ago
  >But I would put $10 down that if I asked you to assert that all medical software in current use that has never killed a patient because of its software issues is therefore "correct", you'd walk back hard. You'd have to be crazy to assert that all such software is "correct". I made no such assertion. That's a straw man. But I think I can safely assume that if the patient dies as a result of the software's functioning, that software is not "correct". You may disagree, but I think it's preferable to have a patient kept alive by an overly-complex system than killed by a simple, elegant, incorrectly functioning one. Not to be intentionally blunt or snarky, but I think Drew DeVault's post was a bunch of rambling, hand-waving nonsense. Until today, I wouldn't have expected anyone to seriously argue that simplicity is more important than correctness. But he comes along and makes that very argument, with a self-assured, authoritative tone, but very little in the way of concrete reasoning, and to my surprise, the number of people on HN who apparently agree with him is non-zero.

jerf 8y ago

A nice snarky reply. But I would put $10 down that if I asked you to assert that all medical software in current use that has never killed a patient because of its software issues is therefore "correct", you'd walk back hard. You'd have to be crazy to assert that all such software is "correct". Unless you are willing to make that assertion, you don't really mean that as a definition. This is also an example of what I mean in my cousin message about the temptation to turn this into a discussion about attention-grabbing bugs. But my framework already encompasses that. Software that kills patients is software very high on the costs side. There's a complicated discussion to be had about how to exactly quantify probabilities of failure vs. cost, but you can't have that discussion if you're stuck in a "correct or not correct" mindset.

rhapsodic 8y ago
>But I would put $10 down that if I asked you to assert that all medical software in current use that has never killed a patient because of its software issues is therefore "correct", you'd walk back hard. You'd have to be crazy to assert that all such software is "correct". I made no such assertion. That's a straw man. But I think I can safely assume that if the patient dies as a result of the software's functioning, that software is not "correct". You may disagree, but I think it's preferable to have a patient kept alive by an overly-complex system than killed by a simple, elegant, incorrectly functioning one. Not to be intentionally blunt or snarky, but I think Drew DeVault's post was a bunch of rambling, hand-waving nonsense. Until today, I wouldn't have expected anyone to seriously argue that simplicity is more important than correctness. But he comes along and makes that very argument, with a self-assured, authoritative tone, but very little in the way of concrete reasoning, and to my surprise, the number of people on HN who apparently agree with him is non-zero.