In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Rob Seaman writes: >On Dec 21, 2005, at 1:33 PM, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote: >
>> You can't separate software from "the real world" any more and >> therefore "software must be responsive to real world issues" is >> about as meaningless as saying "timber must respect the US >> constitution". > >And yet roller coasters must acknowledge gravity, and the space >station control software, the vacuum of space. That is utterly irrelevant: Gravity and vacuum of space are not human conventions they are laws of nature. Leap seconds and indeed any enumeration of time is merely a human convention, and one which have changed many times over history and between cultures. >> As complexity increases, the situation only looks more and more bleak. > >You're a real fun guy, you know it? Complexity is where the fun is. I fully agree, and as long as I only endangered my own close proximity with my coding I used to take the traditional view on software quality: "If the holes go all the way through the card, it's high quality". :-) Unfortunately, I find myself, despite my best efforts, being a victim to the still largely unproven older-wiser connection these days. >Blindly pursuing the deprecation of leap seconds doesn't avoid >liability, it creates it. You seem to think that it will result in a net increase, I think it will result in a net decrease. A better less loaded wording would therefor be "shifts liability". >Arguing that programmers are too ignorant >or careless to correctly account for real world constraints is not a >winning selling point for software solutions. I'm as ashamed as the next guy at how lousy programming is in general, but I still don't see any major willingness anywhere to pay the higher price of quality programming. So while the argument may not sound like a winning selling point for you, I suspect that the vast majority of relevant decision makers will merely ask "Which option costs more money ?" Some of them might after a brief pause ask "... and human lives ?" It would be a nice world where we could all take TF.460, smack our customers, politicians, project leaders etc. on their pointy haired heads and say: "Give me the time and money to do this programming properly!" and have them magically obey the holy writing. It ain't this world though. Poul-Henning -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 [EMAIL PROTECTED] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
