The Wrong Stuff

[Lutger]

Walter Bright wrote:

> http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/thewrongstuff/archive/2010/06/28/risky-
business-james-bagian-nasa-astronaut-turned-patient-safety-expert-on-being-
wrong.aspx
> 
> 
> tl;dr: "Telling people to be careful is not effective. Humans are not reliable
> that way. ... You need a solution that's not about making people perfect."
> 
> 
> This article doesn't say anything about software, but I think it is very
> applicable to programming and the design of programming languages. I often
> hear that a fault isn't a fault because we can "educate" programmers to avoid
> the problem. This article puts the kibosh on that. Errors that we can
> eliminate by changing the design of the language, we should so eliminate
> (unless their costs make the language unuseable, obviously).

Very good article. I also liked this one, about the development done in the 
shuttle software group:

http://www.fastcompany.com/node/28121/print

It has similar conclusions about process and culture.