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GP is essentially proposing that us programmers should become the low-level fall guys. Moreover, the tone of the comment is incredibly condescending. It's all
by dunpeal 8y ago
GP is essentially proposing that us programmers should become the low-level fall guys.
Moreover, the tone of the comment is incredibly condescending. It's all well and good to promote criminal accountability because I'm such an excellent "craftsman"... Until I go to prison because I couldn't foresee that there's a race condition on line 56,394 when the internal clock is off by a nanosecond.
- eslaught 8y agoThere can also be a large discrepancy between how easy a bug is to spot in advance, and how stupid it makes you look after the fact. Plenty of people on HN were bashing "stupid" mistakes leading to security vulnerabilities in recent months and years, even though those bugs we missed by many smart people. Really the only way to deal with this is to try to use tools that make it impossible to make certain classes of bugs. But that's really not an individual choice but an institutional one.
- dunpeal 8y ago> Plenty of people on HN were bashing "stupid" mistakes leading to security vulnerabilities in recent months and years, even though those bugs we missed by many smart people. There are examples of subtle yet fundamental bugs that escaped notice for decades, often under the watchful eyes of some of the smartest, most experienced engineers in the industry: https://ai.googleblog.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-all-about-it-nearly.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-all-about... Another thing people are missing in the misguided comparison to "civil engineering" is that programming is several orders of magnitudes more complex than building bridges. It's much harder to design fault-tolerance, and your routine can completely blow up due to subtle bugs like the above.