Global Technologist based in Shanghai & Silicon Valley. Been in tech for decades, often as CTO or Chief Architect, building things in many industries from construction to manufacturing to insuranc...
Traditional safety-critical stuff such as avionics are indeed most excellent, but it seems we are sliding down a slope to mediocrity as the amount of software goes up many orders of magnitude, including self-driving cars, IoT of all kinds (including industrial), and much more.
There are not 1000x the skilled practitioners (nor investor patience) that we have historically had - something has to give, and I fear it's safety.
To me there is ample evidence in many of these areas that "programmers are generally undisciplined" and/or there is not time, patience, investment, nor willingness to really do it right - we'll see when we get 100+ auto-driving cars out there, drones over our heads, and everything connected to the Internet.
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SpaceX is somehow using Linux for basically everything: in its rockets, the dragon capsule, launch control and monitoring. The linux kernel is not built to safety-critical standards so I'm not sure how they are getting away with it. NASA made a fuss about SpaceX's software development practices a couple of years ago and that all kind of faded away.
Here's a great talk about the concerns people have about using linux in safety-critical settings:
I believe software developers--more or less--deliver the software that their employers truly want (what they say they want is often different).
An employer may say they want secure software with low defect rates but they don't provide training, they don't implement the practices or use the tools that we know lead to better software, the requirements keep changing, the staff have questionable skill, they insist on an aggressive schedule, etc.
So, yeah, I think cars, IOT systems, and drones will kill people. Data breaches aren't going away either. There are only two things that I think might bend the curve here:
regulations with teeth and strong enforcement
software liability laws need to change
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Traditional safety-critical stuff such as avionics are indeed most excellent, but it seems we are sliding down a slope to mediocrity as the amount of software goes up many orders of magnitude, including self-driving cars, IoT of all kinds (including industrial), and much more.
There are not 1000x the skilled practitioners (nor investor patience) that we have historically had - something has to give, and I fear it's safety.
To me there is ample evidence in many of these areas that "programmers are generally undisciplined" and/or there is not time, patience, investment, nor willingness to really do it right - we'll see when we get 100+ auto-driving cars out there, drones over our heads, and everything connected to the Internet.
I couldn't agree more, Steve.
SpaceX is somehow using Linux for basically everything: in its rockets, the dragon capsule, launch control and monitoring. The linux kernel is not built to safety-critical standards so I'm not sure how they are getting away with it. NASA made a fuss about SpaceX's software development practices a couple of years ago and that all kind of faded away.
Here's a great talk about the concerns people have about using linux in safety-critical settings:
I believe software developers--more or less--deliver the software that their employers truly want (what they say they want is often different).
An employer may say they want secure software with low defect rates but they don't provide training, they don't implement the practices or use the tools that we know lead to better software, the requirements keep changing, the staff have questionable skill, they insist on an aggressive schedule, etc.
So, yeah, I think cars, IOT systems, and drones will kill people. Data breaches aren't going away either. There are only two things that I think might bend the curve here: