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Is Uncle Bob serious?

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Re: Is Uncle Bob serious?

#111

Post by ZeroGravitas »

sheepmullet wrote: post #100
magice wrote: post #74

The current state of software safety discussion resembles the state of medical safety discussion 2, 3 decades ago (yeah, software is really really behind time). Back then, too, the thoughts on medical safety also were divided into 2 schools: the professionalism and the process oriented. The former school argues more or less what Uncle Bob argues: blame the damned and * who made the mistakes; be more careful, damn it.…

> Back then, too, the thoughts on medical safety also were divided into 2 schools: the professionalism and the process oriented The key difference is in the medical world safety has been a primary concern from day one. I.e. There has always been a high level of professionalism. That is not true in the software world. Imagine a doctor saying it's 5pm on a Friday and I'm meeting a friend in an hour so I'll just do a ru…

In an article about Medical safety I read they mentioned the numerous (!) times that someone got the wrong leg amputated, and at least one of the medical staff in the room knew that it was the wrong leg but were scared of being targetted for abuse if they publicly corrected their superiors.

This doesn't fit my personal definition of "professionalism".

Re: Is Uncle Bob serious?

#112

Post by [deleted] »

ec109685 wrote: post #110
SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or even better how type systems could work around data integrity errors in RAM without ECC. You realize that you can do ECC in software too, right? You just need the statistical bound on a double fault to be similar to that of the hardware case. Type systems can be used to do this by defining an interface for the data, letting you swap between normal datatypes and ECC ones seamlessly. (And in practice, you only nee…

What stops your program data from being modified or tampwered with without ECC ram, bypassing your checks?

[deleted]

Re: Is Uncle Bob serious?

#113

Post by wtflmaohnisdumb »

naasking wrote: post #98
magice wrote: post #74

The current state of software safety discussion resembles the state of medical safety discussion 2, 3 decades ago (yeah, software is really really behind time). Back then, too, the thoughts on medical safety also were divided into 2 schools: the professionalism and the process oriented. The former school argues more or less what Uncle Bob argues: blame the damned and * who made the mistakes; be more careful, damn it.…

> My take: give it a few more years, and software, too, probably will follow the same path. I doubt it. The stakes are much lower than people's lives and health.

Our algorithms are also harming people's lives and wealth but no one cares because "computers can't be biased!", and these people are generally poor and have no idea.

Re: Is Uncle Bob serious?

#114

Post by mannykannot »

k__ wrote: post #104
mannykannot wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the reason for the fact, that it hasn't been formalized and regulated like, for example, building cars, is simply that it can't be. NASA writes highly reliable software, as do the organizations producing the software for fly-by-wire airplanes, so your assertion is empirically false. You are extrapolating too far from your personal level of knowledge and experience.

Sure they do, but how much is because of formalization? I mean, just look at SQLite, which is a highly reliable software. They bought this stability with a gigantic test suite.

In what way do you think this supports your claims? What argument are you making here?

Re: Is Uncle Bob serious?

#115

Post by tempodox »

I largely agree with the article, with one caveat:

> ...we "just" have to specify the states and behaviors that are not safe and prevent the software from getting into those states.

In general, the number of ways how things can go south tends to infinity, while the desired outcomes are easier to enumerate. I think it would be safer and more feasible in most cases to identify states and behaviours that are valid than the other way round.

Re: Is Uncle Bob serious?

#116

Post by tome »

tpush wrote: post #91
tome wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Type systems to me seem to be (I'm not exaggerating) the answer to all software reliability problems (barring social ones). If you want a property to uphold, formulate it as a type. The compiler verifies. I'm a massive Haskell proponent and I'm calling you out because you're doing typed programming a massive injustice with this kind of overinflated claim. There is no known type system that can get anywhere near sol…

So where does it fall down? Excluding the social ones I mentioned.

Can you prove the correctness of a sort function in the type system? I don't know any mainstream language where you can do that. You'd have to go to something like Agda, Idris, Coq or F* which are hardly practical languages (currently). Beyond that there's an entire universe of complexity that we have no idea how to prove (practically) in the type system. Haskell types encode simple properties. They're extremely useful properties in practice but they don't come anywhere near "everything" we would want to prove.

Re: Is Uncle Bob serious?

#117

Post by sgift »

mannykannot wrote: post #53
k__ wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this really true? I have the feeling "producing software" is a highly volatile process. First, software can do almost everything. You have WhatsApp, DOOM, Photoshop, Ableton Live, Google, Linux etc. which are hugely different systems and it was just the stuff that came to my mind in 10 seconds. Second, the requirements change and change. One person thinking ahead and getting a brilliant idea may end up with produc…

> I think the reason for the fact, that it hasn't been formalized and regulated like, for example, building cars, is simply that it can't be. NASA writes highly reliable software, as do the organizations producing the software for fly-by-wire airplanes, so your assertion is empirically false. You are extrapolating too far from your personal level of knowledge and experience.

> NASA writes highly reliable software, as do the organizations producing the software for fly-by-wire airplanes, so your assertion is empirically false.

What I find interesting is that both of your examples (and many others) are for software which controls physical systems, i.e. which is pretty well defined due to the nature of the machines it controls. Do you have comparable examples which aren't defined by the physical systems they interact with?

Re: Is Uncle Bob serious?

#118

Post by tempodox »

sheepmullet wrote: post #100
magice wrote: post #74

The current state of software safety discussion resembles the state of medical safety discussion 2, 3 decades ago (yeah, software is really really behind time). Back then, too, the thoughts on medical safety also were divided into 2 schools: the professionalism and the process oriented. The former school argues more or less what Uncle Bob argues: blame the damned and * who made the mistakes; be more careful, damn it.…

> Back then, too, the thoughts on medical safety also were divided into 2 schools: the professionalism and the process oriented The key difference is in the medical world safety has been a primary concern from day one. I.e. There has always been a high level of professionalism. That is not true in the software world. Imagine a doctor saying it's 5pm on a Friday and I'm meeting a friend in an hour so I'll just do a ru…

You don't seem to know much about the history and evolution of medicine.

Re: Is Uncle Bob serious?

#119

Post by Turing_Machine »

sgift wrote: post #106
sheepmullet wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Back then, too, the thoughts on medical safety also were divided into 2 schools: the professionalism and the process oriented The key difference is in the medical world safety has been a primary concern from day one. I.e. There has always been a high level of professionalism. That is not true in the software world. Imagine a doctor saying it's 5pm on a Friday and I'm meeting a friend in an hour so I'll just do a ru…

> Imagine a doctor saying it's 5pm on a Friday and I'm meeting a friend in an hour so I'll just do a rush job of this surgery and it will probably work out fine. Imaging right now. No problem. Humans are humans. Humans sometimes do rush jobs. Or are overworked. Or stressed. Maybe they have private problems, so their mind isn't 100% on the task. Your suggestion that doctors are all professionals and wouldn't do such t…

> Imaging right now. No problem.

Same here.

While some argue that the medical malpractice system has been abused, I don't think anyone argues that genuine malpractice doesn't exist. It happens all the time. As you say, doctors are human beings, and sometimes they get lazy, careless, or overworked.

Re: Is Uncle Bob serious?

#120

Post by maxxxxx »

magice wrote: post #74

The current state of software safety discussion resembles the state of medical safety discussion 2, 3 decades ago (yeah, software is really really behind time). Back then, too, the thoughts on medical safety also were divided into 2 schools: the professionalism and the process oriented. The former school argues more or less what Uncle Bob argues: blame the damned and * who made the mistakes; be more careful, damn it.…

I don't think you can compare software to other disciplines like medical, air transportation or architecture. These areas are well understood and pretty mature and move pretty slowly. If we ran air transportation like software somebody would already have self flying airplanes in service. They would crash from time to time though. I personally like the imperfection of software development and the freedom to imagine new things. If we want to be more mature we also have to accept much slower development cycles and innovation will be slower.
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