Goodbye, My Good Friend.

On Mon, 15 Aug 2005 11:33:15 -0700, "Peter Duniho"
wrote:


(getting sucked into an off-topic thread...)

I don't think so. Computers have become such an important part of
flying that we need to address them as much as aerodynamics. Air
Traffic Control, navigation, flight planning, and to a growing extent
our engine controls, are members of that domain.


I think he's talking about the fact that development tools still allow
programmers to do stupid things.

So does the mechanic that forgot to check the last oil line on my
favorite 210. Forced landing and a ruined brand new TSIO-520.

For example, Java and C# add a layer of
protection, making it more difficult for programmers to screw things up.

I tried for years to sell a product called the Input/Output
Requirements Language. In theory it would produce the final code from
the requirement's visual and textual description.

They are still procedural languages, and it may be that programming really
needs a whole paradigm shift to some other sort of programming. Charles
Simonyi was pushing something he was calling "intentional programming" a
while back...so far, nothing real has come of that, but the general thought
that getting a little further from the underlying Turing machine may reduce
mistakes is still valid, IMHO.

I'm not so sure. To me, as a developer, I think that de-humanizing is
the worst solution. Counting lines of code produced per hour is a
good example. We need to get back to individual responsibility for
quality control. And more importantly, individual input for finding
design flaws and their correction. It worked well for NASA in the
1960s. Have we abandonded that work ethic?

That said, most of the problems with programming stem from how careless
people are while doing it. As a programmer myself, I am well aware of the
difference between well-written code and poorly-written code.

I'm a brute force programmer myself. My stuff works.

Most code is
poorly-written, IMHO. This is true through all phases of implementation,
from the original design and architecture, through the actual coding, and
finally with respect to testing, both on the part of the programmer as well
as on the quality assurance folks, should they actually exist.


One of the hardest things that I've done is customer acceptance.
Despite all of the meetings and testing, there is no way we can seem
to just let the system work. There is always something more to do.
That is the point where I would dearly love to start over again with
the latest technology and "do it right".

For the most part, engineering in other technical areas tries to take into
account human error. Structures are built with some margin of extra
strength, machinery attempts to include designs that help prevent the user
from killing themselves, etc. Programming, on the other hand, still pretty
much lets the programmer do whatever dumb thing they want. Protected memory
operating systems (ie, pretty much every operating system in common use
today) do help prevent one bad programmer from messing up someone else's
stuff. But even there, a given application is not protected from itself,
and certain components of the operating system can still bring the whole
mess down (audio and video drivers being a common culprit).


Those are tangible and measurable. With computers it's more like the
fad a few years ago with artificial intellegence. A friend who
studied that at the Phd level explained that the goal was like
defining artificial masculinity. He also looked at genetic
engineering and asked, "What if you changed one line of code in the
most complex program ever written?"

At some point, perhaps programming WILL develop better tools, and maybe even
more stringent standards of quality. I saw an ultrasound machine at the
hospital crash the other day; during a routine exam, this wasn't a problem,
but what if it had been being used during some kind of invasive procedure
(ultrasound-guided fine-needle aspirate, for example). And no, the
ultrasound machine wasn't running Windows (or any other off-the-shelf
operating system). The more pervasive computers become, the more important
it will be to hold programmers to higher standards.


Yes, and that gets back to the individual.

Until then, they are going to keep making the same stupid mistakes every
other careless human being does on a daily basis. And there are a LOT of
careless human beings.


We're human. Thank God. Or at least the incredibly long string of
random events that put us here.

Please note, the above is a broad oversimplification of the issues at hand.
This is the sort of thing that a professional committee could spend a year
talking about and still not come up with a good answer. Pretty hard to sum
up in a single Usenet post, even a long one.

Pete


Mike Weller