Re: "Tracking the Blackout bug"

[Peter Amey <peter.amey@praxis-cs.co.uk>]

sk wrote:
> Article at "The Register" about the electricity blackout
> in the Northeast (USA) last year.
> 
> No directly relevent to c.l.a but interesting since it talks
> of race conditions etc. which are issues of Ada.
> 
> 
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/08/blackout_bug_report/
> 
> 

Interesting read.  What I do find irritating are quotes such as

"The company did everything it could..."
"We text exhaustively..."
"Unfortunately, that's kind of the nature of software..."

All these statements are untrue and they also reflect a kind of 
defeatism that I wholly reject (imagine Boeing saying "OK, the wings did 
fall off, but we tested it a lot and anyway that is just the nature of 
aeroplanes").

The developers did NOT do everything they could.  They could have used 
the Ravenscar profile in Ada; they could use RavenSPARK; they could have 
done some model checking of the concurrent parts of the program.  They 
did NOT test exhaustively because it is impossible (/exhaustingly/ I am 
willing to believe).  And software doesn't HAVE to be cr*p!

sigh

Peter