Everyone who writes safety critical software should read this

[Walter Bright]

On 10/30/2013 11:35 AM, Russel Winder wrote:
> Has any programming language ever had psychology of programming folk
> involved from the outset rather than after the fact as a "patch up"
> activity?

I think they all have. The "patch up" activity comes from discovering that they 
were wrong :-)

One of my favorite anecdotes comes from the standardized jargon used in 
aviation. When you are ready to take off, you throttle up to max power first. 
Hence, the standard jargon for firewalling the throttles is "takeoff power".

This lasted until an incident where the pilot, coming in for a landing, realized 
he had to abort the landing and go around. He yelled "takeoff power", and the 
copilot promptly powered down the engines, causing the plane to stall and crash.

"take off power", get it?

The standard phrase was then changed to "full power" or "maximum power", I 
forgot which.

This all seems so so obvious in hindsight, doesn't it? But the best minds didn't 
see it until after there was an accident. This is all too common.