There's a lot of nice information here about quality requirements and expectations. Thanks for this nice overview of the situation.
The code of ethics however is not something that people are required to follow, nor do they represent a an agreed upon view of what ethics in software actually are.
By that list of ethics the entire phone app ecosystem and most websites would also not be in existence. The trade-off between quality, honesty and getting shiny stuff is something people are overly comfortable with (oddly, just not in airlines). I've written about this before, Are we forever cursed with buggy software
On a minor note, the 200million lines of code seems quite excessive. The full linux kernel, if all modules, drivers, everything is compiled in, is less then 20million lines. Surely the OS is the dominant source of code in car, thus I don't see it exceeding 20million lines of code. Though in fairness, I don't think that invalidates your point about bugs.
I'm a small business programmer. I love solving tough problems with Python and PHP. If you like what you're seeing, you should probably follow me here on dev.to and then checkout my blog.
And you are correct. Nobody is required to follow the code of ethics to which I linked in the post. If my post implies that, it was not my intention. Most people haven't studied ethics so I was just presenting a default set of ethics so we could talk about the issues.
I'd argue that some of the existing products might not be very ethical. There's certainly a spectrum of 'goodness' out there in the app ecosystem but I'm not here to debate that part of it.
200 million lines of code does seem like a lot. But it's often quoted. Like here for example.
There's a crazy amount of code in (tiny computers/big microcontrollers) and there are a lot of them in modern cars.
That number of loc doesn’t seem too far outside of what I found when searching for estimates for normal cars (non self-driving) that are on the road today. Generally they’re fine, so I don’t think focusing on the total lines of code is so important.
The real question is simply how effective the self driving component is, which surely will be less code. In a way maybe it’s the weights used by the neural network that are going to be the most important issue rather than the source code for the net itself.
I’m not saying your overall point is invalid, just that the loc argument itself may be a bit of a straw man.
I'm a small business programmer. I love solving tough problems with Python and PHP. If you like what you're seeing, you should probably follow me here on dev.to and then checkout my blog.
There's a lot of nice information here about quality requirements and expectations. Thanks for this nice overview of the situation.
The code of ethics however is not something that people are required to follow, nor do they represent a an agreed upon view of what ethics in software actually are.
By that list of ethics the entire phone app ecosystem and most websites would also not be in existence. The trade-off between quality, honesty and getting shiny stuff is something people are overly comfortable with (oddly, just not in airlines). I've written about this before, Are we forever cursed with buggy software
On a minor note, the 200million lines of code seems quite excessive. The full linux kernel, if all modules, drivers, everything is compiled in, is less then 20million lines. Surely the OS is the dominant source of code in car, thus I don't see it exceeding 20million lines of code. Though in fairness, I don't think that invalidates your point about bugs.
You're welcome.
And you are correct. Nobody is required to follow the code of ethics to which I linked in the post. If my post implies that, it was not my intention. Most people haven't studied ethics so I was just presenting a default set of ethics so we could talk about the issues.
I'd argue that some of the existing products might not be very ethical. There's certainly a spectrum of 'goodness' out there in the app ecosystem but I'm not here to debate that part of it.
200 million lines of code does seem like a lot. But it's often quoted. Like here for example.
There's a crazy amount of code in (tiny computers/big microcontrollers) and there are a lot of them in modern cars.
That number of loc doesn’t seem too far outside of what I found when searching for estimates for normal cars (non self-driving) that are on the road today. Generally they’re fine, so I don’t think focusing on the total lines of code is so important.
The real question is simply how effective the self driving component is, which surely will be less code. In a way maybe it’s the weights used by the neural network that are going to be the most important issue rather than the source code for the net itself.
I’m not saying your overall point is invalid, just that the loc argument itself may be a bit of a straw man.
Yup, I totally agree.
LOC is a terrible measure.
A dev on the self driving project doesn't need to be concerned with the code in the micro controller that's managing the left front window opener.
But the general point I was trying to get across is that these cars are more complex and have much more software in them than most people realize.
Cheers.