5 ms·
Programmer education, tools, language standards and best practices are all vastly different than 50 years ago. That's like pointing at a Ford Edsel and then cla
by 7e 3y ago
Programmer education, tools, language standards and best practices are all vastly different than 50 years ago. That's like pointing at a Ford Edsel and then claiming that modern humans can't make good cars.
- marcus0x62 3y agoI’m not pointing at a contemporary akin to Ford or Edsel. I’m pointing at people today using the latest versions of these tools today making the same class of mistake as someone might have made 4 or 5 decades ago. The tool is the problem.
- moomin 3y agoIronically, Margaret Hamilton _was_ able to produce a bug free program back in the 60s. However, no-one is seriously considering replicating her techniques because they (some of them, ant least) are way too expensive for modern software.
- marcus0x62 3y ago1) The Apollo Guidance Computer software was not bug-free[0] 2) The AGC software was not written in C++ The NASA approach to software development undoubtedly results in high quality assurance, but at a huge productivity cost that most commercials shops could not shoulder. What do you do about the huge amount of software that needs to be developed that is too complex and cannot justify things like having 5 independent concurrent executions running two completely separate but functionally identical code bases tested by a completely independent adversarial test team? I’d argue you could start by using tools that don’t allow, let alone encourage, your programmers to make common mistakes with catastrophic consequences. 0 — see, for instance, https://ibiblio.org/apollo/Documents/COM-1.pdf https://ibiblio.org/apollo/Documents/COM-1.pdf
- pkulak 3y agoIn 1958 35,000 people died on American roads. Last year, 43,000. So yeah, cars have gotten safer at about the rate that C++ has.
- drewda 3y agoJust as what's damning to C++ is how its security track-record compares to other programming languages available today, it's how the US's current number of roadway deaths and serious injuries compares to other developed nations that is so embarrassing and depressing: > [I]n the last 30 years, the US has not kept pace with tumbling traffic death rates in Europe, east Asia and Canada. In 2021, as the US hit a 16-year high for fatalities, Japan and Norway posted the lowest number of road deaths since the 1940s. > The contrast is especially striking among so-called vulnerable road users, a category that includes walkers as well as those using bikes, scooters and wheelchairs. According to the OECD, pedestrian deaths in the US rose over 40% from 2010-18, more than twice the pace of any other member country (most of which saw a decline). https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-11-03/why-us-traffic-safety-fell-so-far-behind-other-countries https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-11-03/why-us-tr...
- cbsmith 3y agoThe rate of deaths has dramatically declined. A lot more people are driving, and they're driving a lot more.
- shrimp_emoji 3y agoHehe, but if you count "broken dependencies" as accidents/fatalities akin to bugs, it's way safer than all new languages by virtue of being too old/disorganized for a built-in packaging system. The left-pad incident was a 4,000,000-car pile up!
- heresie-dabord 3y agoAn Edsel, 70 years later, still doesn't have seat belts, air bags, a crumple zone, and a crash-test rating. Almost all modern cars are better.