> countless lives lost
I have no doubt that people have had their lives ruined, or even died, as the result of flaws in system programming, but is anyone actually tracking this? Is it "countless?"
I have no doubt that people have had their lives ruined, or even died, as the result of flaws in system programming, but is anyone actually tracking this? Is it "countless?"
"What have you done? That vase was priceless!"
"Oh good, I was afraid it was expensive."
Rust: "If you're not doing this, you're a murderer."
I'm a huge fan of thorough designs, engineering formalities and quantifying application performance, but if we're building some fast food ordering app is expected to increase sales by 10 percent as soon as it's done and there's no risk from quality or availability or performance of the application (other than the 10 percent extra sales, we expect people to walk in / drive thru like normal if it under-performs on those metrics) then it's obvious the business value is in launching a minimal implementation as soon as possible using tools that optimize for productivity, not safety or performance.
Too often I see dogmatic pure functional TDD line of business app with continuous deployment infrastructure that could break for two weeks at a time without impacting anyone, or the copy-pasted-code-from-google-searches business-critical application that loses money for every hour it's offline but has no software development lifecycle or monitoring or alerting or anything.
But in all seriousness, I am curious about this as well.
In my CS program we had an ethics class that included stories of bad X-ray machine software that overdosed people. Bad, bad bad. I don't think many people died as a direct result, but 10 years later there was probably a spiked cancer incidence. Did software kill people? Well yeah....kinda.
In airplane systems, there have been a number of cases where bad alerting / warning systems basically either misled the pilot or lulled them into a false sense of security prior to events that caused crashes. Did software kill people? Uhm, yes, I think, sort of, but not directly?
It's only when we get fully sentient AI that arms itself and decides to clean up the human pestilence that we'll be able to draw a straight line there. :)
Errors in the software of a MIM-104 Patriot resulted in failure to locate and intercept an incoming missile and the death of 28 soldiers. http://www.gao.gov/products/IMTEC-92-26
Errors in the software of a Chinook helicopter may have lead to a crash that killed 29 people. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200102/ldselect/l...
Errors in the software of Toyota's throttle control system may have lead to the death of 89 people. https://betterembsw.blogspot.ch/2014/09/a-case-study-of-toyo...
More: http://www.baselinemag.com/c/a/Projects-Processes/Eight-Fata...
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_unintended_acceleration...
Caused by unsigned 8-bit integer overflow combined with (presumably) treating 0 as falsy. May or may not have been solved by using Rust (but probably wouldn't have because it sounds like a logic error in "clever" code).
> Errors in the software of a MIM-104 Patriot…
Caused by loss of precision in floating-point calculations. Would not have been solved by using Rust.
The other two were more likely human or mechanical than (unspecified) software errors.
if counter > 0 {
deploy_radiation_shield();
}I was just thinking about this the other day when using Spotify in the car. Spotify's UI is pretty good, but after they lost all my saved songs, I've had to resort to only using playlists, which require 3x as many clicks to add a song.
I think realistically we need to ask: would it be a better situation if no system program were allowed for lack of safety. Because I think humanity in general is better with existence of unsafe software vs no software exist at all unless it is safe as per rigorous safety standards.