On Thursday, 18 September 2014 at 16:55:33 UTC, H. S. Teoh via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
Seriously, this philosophy of ignoring supposedly "minor" bugs
in
software is what led to the sad state of software today, where
nothing
is reliable and people have come to expect that software will
inevitably
crash, and that needing to reboot an OS every now and then just
to keep
things working is acceptable. Yet, strangely enough, people
will scream
bloody murder if a car behaved like that.
A car did behave like that--the Toyota Prius. It would randomly
accelerate out of control because of a bug in the car's software.
People died. And yes, bloody murder was screamed.
I used to work for the telephone company, and telcos are a bit
weird because they're considered an essential service. If
martial law were enacted in the US, telephone workers would still
be allowed on the street because the telephone system must work.
There was one instance when I was working that I had to get to
the switch for maintenance during a horrible storm where the
police had closed the roads. No problem--they let me through.
Network services are rapidly approaching this point. People
depend on the internet for communication these days as much or
more than they do on telephone calls. I suspect/hope that it
won't be long before communications software is held to standards
similar to telephone, which will require a huge adjustment on the
part of programmers. People in this industry still tend to not
think of things in terms of 5+ "nines" of uptime for their
service, despite that being the expectation of their users.
