Hmm - that's not good. That said, once I read the article title, my first thought was "Therac-25"? A quick skim before I read it confirmed that suspicion.
...and I have to add that I'm one of those "informally educated software engineers" - though I've never touched or worked on any kind of safety-critical systems (and I would decline such a position if offered, to be honest). I've been doing SWE for over 25 years now, and the only "formal schooling" I've had in the field was a couple of community college classes I took to learn C/C++ 2+ decades ago. Everything else has either been learned thru my employment, or at home. Prior to my first "professional" position in 1992, all I had was a high school degree and an associates from a trade school in "computer electronics".
But even I know about the Therac-25, and it's always in the back of my head.
The fairly recent change in the industry surrounding automated testing, test case programming, CI, etc - all of that which more or less fell out of the whole "agile" movement - has led to a vast improvement in software, imho. Yet bugs still persist, despite all of that and more.
We have to do better - I don't know how, or if it's even possible (from what I understand, it's not mathematically possible, except in maybe certain trivial examples, to validate all possible states of code - maybe I'm mistaken on that).
cr0sh|6 years ago
...and I have to add that I'm one of those "informally educated software engineers" - though I've never touched or worked on any kind of safety-critical systems (and I would decline such a position if offered, to be honest). I've been doing SWE for over 25 years now, and the only "formal schooling" I've had in the field was a couple of community college classes I took to learn C/C++ 2+ decades ago. Everything else has either been learned thru my employment, or at home. Prior to my first "professional" position in 1992, all I had was a high school degree and an associates from a trade school in "computer electronics".
But even I know about the Therac-25, and it's always in the back of my head.
The fairly recent change in the industry surrounding automated testing, test case programming, CI, etc - all of that which more or less fell out of the whole "agile" movement - has led to a vast improvement in software, imho. Yet bugs still persist, despite all of that and more.
We have to do better - I don't know how, or if it's even possible (from what I understand, it's not mathematically possible, except in maybe certain trivial examples, to validate all possible states of code - maybe I'm mistaken on that).
dang|6 years ago
It's good when not every title is completely obvious. It makes readers work a little and gets the brain out of internet reflex mode.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
dredmorbius|6 years ago