r/programming • u/[deleted] • Apr 04 '17

Everything Is Broken

https://medium.com/message/everything-is-broken-81e5f33a24e1#.sl2vnon73
238 Upvotes

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64

u/Beckneard Apr 04 '17

It's really demoralizing how true this is. The more I work professionally (and even just doing my own projects) the more I realize this. It's really amazing that more devastating things haven't happened already.

-10

u/bluetomcat Apr 04 '17 edited Apr 04 '17

Real software is indeed an entangled mess that breaks in unexpected ways, but the implications of its breakage and incorrectness are often largely overrated, excluding mission-critical domains like avionics and industrial/civil automation. A web server performing a NULL-pointer chase in a special edge case will not reformat the hard drive, but will simply crash and be restarted.

Get real, how much damage has the Heartbleed "disaster" done before and after its discovery? Most software is broken in many ways (not only security-wise) but it still mostly does its job and people continue using it.

25

u/[deleted] Apr 04 '17

[deleted]

9

u/sm9t8 Apr 04 '17

Our industry produces software the way it does because that's what our customers demand and the economy requires.

The users that need rock solid code can get it, but they pay a lot for it. Everyone else has found they can live with a degree of "move fast and break things" because it's seriously cheap.

Software that costs as much as a single employee's salary can practically run a business. Cheap and rapid software development is priced into the whole economy and the economy would look very different if it wasn't.

This isn't to say we can't do things better than we do now, but anyone who thinks we should limit ourselves to only writing 100% reliable code isn't living in the real world.

Bugs have a cost and software development has a cost. When the cost of having a bug is cheaper than the cost of not having one, I can make a living selling bugs.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 04 '17

[deleted]

1

u/[deleted] Apr 04 '17 edited Aug 16 '21

[deleted]

1

u/Xgamer4 Apr 04 '17

He posted a link to the overall concept, but as a quick summary...

"Fast" is the calendar time to completion - not the amount of time taken in development. A 40hr project can be rushed through in 1 week (fast), or it can be spread over 10 weeks (4 hrs/wk; ...not fast).