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Engineering is the art of making trade-offs between multiple competing concerns. Efficiency is one such concern but it is not the only one. Safety matters too
by lisper 5y ago
Engineering is the art of making trade-offs between multiple competing concerns. Efficiency is one such concern but it is not the only one. Safety matters too. You can make aircraft more efficient by eliminating all of the safety equipment and redundant systems. That might have made sense for the Wright Flyer but no sane person would advocate that for a modern passenger airliner.
If the subtraction problem were the only issue that might be manageable but it is not. It is just one example of a very long list of such problems. C and C++ are metaphorical minefields of gotchas, any one of which can result in a literal crash or a security breach, which in today's world can be every bit as damaging as a physical failure of a critical system. Actual examples of this occur on an almost daily basis. It is akin to trying to build a modern passenger aircraft out of wood and muslin. It really is unacceptable.
- ncmncm 5y agoYet, you would be happy to release a safety-critical system with only run-time type checking? Engineering is a discipline that requires years of study and supervised practice, not reducible to "the art of making trade-offs". Non-engineers hired to perform engineers' jobs like to make this sort of mistake. Management might not be able to tell the difference. Thence 737-MAX.
- lisper 5y ago> Yet, you would be happy to release a safety-critical system with only run-time type checking? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque To say nothing of the fact that your backhanded assertion is completely baseless. Also, C and C++ provide neither run-time safety nor compile-time safety, so you argument is a non-sequitur as well.