4 ms·

Most "new tech" is engineering, not science. If you want empiricism try academic papers instead of mailing lists ;) Some numbers: most critical bugs in the Lin

Most "new tech" is engineering, not science. If you want empiricism try academic papers instead of mailing lists ;) Some numbers: most critical bugs in the Linux kernel are due to memory safety: 40 out of 65 bugs allowing for code execution found in Linux in 2017 could have been prevented by using a memory-safe language [0]. The paper is about Go, but the same logic applies for Rust. Fun fact: 39 out of these 40 bugs were in drivers [1], so I think starting with drivers in Rust is a good idea. [0] https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi18/presentation/cutler https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi18/presentation/cutler (really good read!) [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.06344.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.06344.pdf (disclaimer: I'm a co-author of that paper)

juped 5y ago
Do you think engineering is somehow less empirical and more abstract than science?
sk1459 5y ago
Calling programming engineering in the absence of licensure or any standard of performance for the entire industry is kind of silly.
- danhor 5y ago
  This is a popular argument, but I'd argue isn't really true. Looking at electrical engineering, there is no standard license and no standard of performance. Like programming, it's just too broad across different areas with vastly different requirements. The equivalent of very sloppy web development might be a blinky (non-kids) toy, that fails after a few uses with no particular requirements (other than "make it as cheap as possible"). Or look at how often smartphones and laptops fail electrically (or compound failures) for really obvious reasons, that just weren't important enough to fix. To address the particular point being made here, lots of things in EE are experience driven, for example which decoupling capacitors to use or to not use 90 degree angels on pcbs. I think many aspects of typical engineering are way more driven by experience and vague rules of thumb than we expect looking in from the outside. The reason why this is more obvious in software development may be because it's pretty hard to have good measurements and understanding failures is pretty hard and working around them is pretty easy.
- mlindner 5y ago
  Very few countries in the world have "licensure" for engineers. It's not a protected term of any sort in the US nor in most of Europe. Canada is one of the few places that's strict about it. Occupational licensing is a form of job market restriction that's generally frowned upon.
  - _dps 5y ago
    In the three European countries I've lived in (2 in EU + UK), licensed engineers must sign off on new building construction plans, and take responsibility for the suitability of the design.
    - mlindner 5y ago
      Licensed engineers exist, but the term "engineer" is not protected.
phendrenad2 5y ago
Ridiculous. Have you met engineers from other disciplines? They employ empiricism constantly. You can't build the golden gate bridge without proving that the steel you want to use can take the strain. "Obviously steel C is better than steel Y" won't cut it. If anything, software development is sandcastle-building. We all have ideas on how to build it, but at the end of the day we're just amateurs fucking around with plastic shovels.
- kaba0 5y ago
  Arguably, other disciplines doesn’t have to handle undecidable problems everywhere. Building a bridge can basically be “statically analyzed” completely, in that every requirement is known beforehand and there is a very constrained mutable state there. On the other hand, even the most basic program one can write will have properties not decidable without actually running the program. I would like to see much more rigorous testing/quality control in user-facing apps as well like websites, but lower level tools usually are written with much higher quality. You would be hard pressed to routinely find a bug in eg. the JVM — and writing formally verified programs is infeasible for any significant complexity.
  - littlestymaar 5y ago
    > Building a bridge can basically be “statically analyzed” completely This. And even then, after the calculations are done the engineer add a “safety margin” (and it's not 10%, more like 500 or 1000%).
    - kaba0 5y ago
      Good point. And also, it is possible to add safety margins to other areas of engineering. One may be able to eg. store an array with padded nulls (actually we sort of do it at an OS level, just not with null but some “magic number”), but if it’s a loop/recursion, non-correct software will blow up either way - here it is more close to mathematics than science or engineering in my opinion.
  - ncmncm 5y ago

juped 5y ago

Do you think engineering is somehow less empirical and more abstract than science?

sk1459 5y ago

Calling programming engineering in the absence of licensure or any standard of performance for the entire industry is kind of silly.

danhor 5y ago
This is a popular argument, but I'd argue isn't really true. Looking at electrical engineering, there is no standard license and no standard of performance. Like programming, it's just too broad across different areas with vastly different requirements. The equivalent of very sloppy web development might be a blinky (non-kids) toy, that fails after a few uses with no particular requirements (other than "make it as cheap as possible"). Or look at how often smartphones and laptops fail electrically (or compound failures) for really obvious reasons, that just weren't important enough to fix. To address the particular point being made here, lots of things in EE are experience driven, for example which decoupling capacitors to use or to not use 90 degree angels on pcbs. I think many aspects of typical engineering are way more driven by experience and vague rules of thumb than we expect looking in from the outside. The reason why this is more obvious in software development may be because it's pretty hard to have good measurements and understanding failures is pretty hard and working around them is pretty easy.
mlindner 5y ago
Very few countries in the world have "licensure" for engineers. It's not a protected term of any sort in the US nor in most of Europe. Canada is one of the few places that's strict about it. Occupational licensing is a form of job market restriction that's generally frowned upon.
- _dps 5y ago
  In the three European countries I've lived in (2 in EU + UK), licensed engineers must sign off on new building construction plans, and take responsibility for the suitability of the design.
  - mlindner 5y ago
    Licensed engineers exist, but the term "engineer" is not protected.

phendrenad2 5y ago

Ridiculous. Have you met engineers from other disciplines? They employ empiricism constantly. You can't build the golden gate bridge without proving that the steel you want to use can take the strain. "Obviously steel C is better than steel Y" won't cut it. If anything, software development is sandcastle-building. We all have ideas on how to build it, but at the end of the day we're just amateurs fucking around with plastic shovels.

kaba0 5y ago
Arguably, other disciplines doesn’t have to handle undecidable problems everywhere. Building a bridge can basically be “statically analyzed” completely, in that every requirement is known beforehand and there is a very constrained mutable state there. On the other hand, even the most basic program one can write will have properties not decidable without actually running the program. I would like to see much more rigorous testing/quality control in user-facing apps as well like websites, but lower level tools usually are written with much higher quality. You would be hard pressed to routinely find a bug in eg. the JVM — and writing formally verified programs is infeasible for any significant complexity.
- littlestymaar 5y ago
  > Building a bridge can basically be “statically analyzed” completely This. And even then, after the calculations are done the engineer add a “safety margin” (and it's not 10%, more like 500 or 1000%).
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Good point. And also, it is possible to add safety margins to other areas of engineering. One may be able to eg. store an array with padded nulls (actually we sort of do it at an OS level, just not with null but some “magic number”), but if it’s a loop/recursion, non-correct software will blow up either way - here it is more close to mathematics than science or engineering in my opinion.
- ncmncm 5y ago