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There's a lot of negativity and disdain in this thread, but something is being overlooked: You simply can't apply "startup-style" development to something like
by na85 12y ago
There's a lot of negativity and disdain in this thread, but something is being overlooked: You simply can't apply "startup-style" development to something like air traffic control. This isn't your latest javascript app where you can push an update to fix localization bugs after the client reports an issue.
This is air traffic control, and thousands of lives are at risk every day. This stuff has to work. It has to be bulletproof.
The FAA doesn't refactor existing codebases into Haskell on a whim. A lot of this code and the hardware it runs on has been thoroughly vetted, not to mention battle-tested over decades of use. "Move fast and break stuff" is not an attitude I want FAA-certified gear to be built with.
- jmspring 12y agoThis makes me wonder where the threads (beyond server scaling) around resiliency on HN are. I'm doing some non-critical embedded programming at the moment (typically do full stack stuff), but embedded and critical systems are much different than the typical audience here....
- na85 12y agoIt's easier, flashier, and more immediately gratifying to slap together a new javascript framework. Embedded is hard. Fault-tolerant is hard. Debugging is hard and also very tedious.
- davidw 12y agoIt's way easier to build a web company than something that involves difficult programming, may well involve hardware, and probably doesn't have the upside potential that a web thing does. That's why there isn't as much of that kind of thing. That said, I love to read about embedded stuff, because some of those guys are really sharp. I'm also a user and fan of Erlang.
- dkarapetyan 12y agoI think the negativity is warranted. There is too much bureaucratic overhead and even it wasn't purely bureaucratic it should not take a decade to design a resilient and fault-tolerant software/hardware system. Margaret Hamilton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_%28scientist%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_%28scientist%...) might have a few things to say on the matter.
- na85 12y agoWhen I build a tool shed in the woods in cottage/lake country, I can do things a lot more casually than someone building a skyscraper in Manhattan can. I probably don't even need a permit. At no point did I say that the process behind NextGen is perfect.
- dkarapetyan 12y agoWhat would you call sending people to the moon? A tool shed in the woods or something else entirely? It's not like there isn't documented historical precedent for building such complicated systems. That's what the link to Margaret Hamilton was supposed to illuminate but I guess I should have been more explicit.
- snowwrestler 12y ago> What would you call sending people to the moon? A huge dangerous experiment. Out of 12 Apollo missions, 2 ended in disaster. The Apollo 1 fire killed 3 people, and we all know the story of Apollo 13. I wouldn't call the space program an acceptable comparison for how our commercial aviation system should work.
- wglb 12y agoI suspect that the requirements for the Apollo software are significantly simpler than those needed for air traffic control.
- dkarapetyan 12y agoMaybe, maybe not. The general principles should still be applicable.