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You’re right. What we should also do is that all critical code that may significantly impact lives and people’s wealth and security should be written in a manne
by addicted 8y ago
You’re right. What we should also do is that all critical code that may significantly impact lives and people’s wealth and security should be written in a manner that can be understood by laymen.
So functional programming is right out. Anything more complex than BASIC is probably not a solution. Probably only literate programming is allowed.
- ianbicking 8y agoThere was some short Ted Nelson video I watched a while ago (I'm afraid I'll never find it) where he made this claim: they needed SQL and a separation of concerns (i.e., DBA) to build up a financial system where it was hard to embezzle money. And it's not JUST ACID and transactions that you need (though you definitely need those things!) but also the ability to audit access to the database-of-record, which SQL gives you. Maybe the corollary is that you should build up an appropriate domain DSL so that you can express your important claims or transactions in a comprehensible way. It's not to say that you can't misimplement the DSL to your advantage, but there's an implicit good-faith claim you are making that is different from raw vertically-integrated code.
- marcus_holmes 8y agoIt sounds like a straw-man argument, but you're probably exactly right. There are still billions of lines of production COBOL code out there, about as complex as BASIC, running all our financial and infrastructure systems. Simple is sometimes much, much, better than performant or elegant.