Uncle Bob and Silver Bullets
I just finished reading an extremely depressing article in The Atlantic entitled: The Coming Software Apocalypse. The article does a good job, at first, of describing several terrible software bugs that have harmed, maimed, and killed people. But then the article veers off in a direction that I found disheartening.
The author of the article interviewed many thought leaders in the industry, but chose only those thought leaders who were inventing new technologies. Those technologies were things like Light Table, Model Driven Engineering, and TLA+.
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The obvious solution:
- Raise the level of software discipline and professionalism.
- Never make excuses for sloppy work.
If only it were that easy.
Hillel Wayne (via Hacker News):
One of the core assumptions of modern systems engineering is that there’s a constant flow of defects: that people make mistakes. You can’t rely on people to not fuck up on their own: after all, the US still has 30,000 auto deaths a year. Rather, the best way to reduce the volume and severity of mistakes is to adjust the system itself. Either make them harder to do, make them easier to catch, or make them cause less damage when they do happen. Don’t just blame the drivers, give them safe roads! Give them seatbelts!
[…]
But unit tests are not enough. Type systems are not enough. Contracts are not enough, formal specs are not enough, code review isn’t enough, nothing is enough. We have to use everything we have to even hope of writing correct code, because there’s only one way a program is right and infinite ways a program can be wrong, and we can’t assume that any tool we use will prevent more than a narrow slice of all those wrong ways.
