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>Every person who has ever programmed a computer or worked in any complex system knows they can't be relied upon 100%. I know I can rest assured the Excel spre
by Dalewyn 2y ago
>Every person who has ever programmed a computer or worked in any complex system knows they can't be relied upon 100%.
I know I can rest assured the Excel spreadsheet for my monthly and annual budget is perfectly accurate and reliable.
I know the computers powering the stuff my life depends on are perfectly not accurate and reliable.
Put another way: The microwave oven or coffee maker in my kitchen? Yeah, the 'pooters in them are working perfectly. The mainframes jackhammering away at the Automated Clearing House? My money will get through the banking system perfectly eventually some day. The jetliner or my car I'm about to get in? Dude, that thing better have dozens of computers acting in redundancy because that shit ain't working.
I wonder if there's a law stating that the reliability of a computer is inverse to the value of the workload.
- bostik 2y ago> I know I can rest assured the Excel spreadsheet for my monthly and annual budget is perfectly accurate and reliable. Consider yourself lucky that your use cases are all on the happy path. There are entire categories of bugs and inconsistencies where Excel's behaviour is known to be wrong, but which can't be fixed because the rest of the ecosystem depends on those same errors to manifest in the same ways. For example - formulas with cycles have an upper bound as to how many times they are allowed to cycle. If you happen to hit the ceiling before your values converge, you will be left with the values calculated on the last iteration.