Re: "Tracking the Blackout bug"

[Mark Lorenzen <mark.lorenzen@ofir.dk>]

Peter Amey <peter.amey@praxis-cs.co.uk> writes:

> 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

It is unbelievable how often I have heard the third statement quoted
above. When I try to argue that constructing a software system is just
as much an engineering task as constructing a bridge (although much
less mature), I am met with disbelief and "hackish" counter-arguments.

These arguments always turn on single point - that programming is an
art or maybe even something resembling a magic craft, which can only
be learned through years of hacking. And most certainly you can't use
any theoretical knowledge when constructing "real" systems (as opposed
to the fancy useless university exercises).

Funny enough, the discussion is always about programming and not
construction. For some reason, the programming task is regarded as
something special and holy - probably the reason why programming
language discussions always turn into holy wars.

- Mark Lorenzen