Gregory's Server
@natecull john roderick often talks about his ~85 year old mother on his podcasts, and describes how she (as a programmer in the 1950s-1960s) is appalled at pretty much all bugs in computer programs and the blasรฉ attitude developers have, saying something like "back when I worked on those machines we made sure the code was correct before we sent it to anybody, we spent months and years making sure everything was completely correct before any of it was sold"
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@jk @natecull Back then, though, #programmers were #mathematicians and/or #physicists; nowadays, programmers are people who visited #codecademy and #geeksforgeeks ^^ @jk to be fair, producing software in that manner is how you often end up with user interfaces and feature sets that don't meet the needs or expectations of the end users there's a reason software development today is largely incremental and iterative, and that reason isn't because coders are lazy or incompetent  End use and how easy it is to correct errors makes a big difference - its way harder to stop a batch run of bank transactions to fix a bug or to make a site visit to physical equipment, yeet its EPROMS and replace them with the updated firmware. My car's braking system has a software version number, I would expect this code to have a much higher standard of testing and quality checking than the entertainment system (which locks up and has to be rebooted every so often) |
@jk @natecull "months and years", a luxury today's developers do not have