This thread on Hacker News terrifies me

[tide]

On Friday, 31 August 2018 at 19:50:20 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17880722
>
> Typical comments:
>
> "Stopping all executing may not be the correct 'safe state' for 
> an airplane though!"

Depends on the aircraft and how it is implemented. If you have a 
plane that is fly by wire, and you stop all executing then even 
the pilot no longer has control of the plane anymore, which would 
be very bad.


> "One faction believed you should never intentionally crash the 
> app"
>
> "One place I worked had a team that was very adamant about not 
> really having much error checking. Not much of any qc process, 
> either. Wait for someone to complain about bad data and 
> respond. Honestly, this worked really well for small, 
> skunkworks type projects that needed to be nimble."
>
> And on and on. It's unbelievable. The conventional wisdom in 
> software for how to deal with programming bugs simply does not 
> exist.

Depends on the software being developed, for a game? Stopping at 
every assert would be madness. Let a lone having an over 
ubundance of asserts. Can't even imagine how many asserts there 
would be in for something like a matrix multiplication. An 
operation that would otherwise be branchless having numerous 
branches for all the index checks that would be done. Twice per 
scalar value access. And so on and so on.

> Here's the same topic on Reddit with the same awful ideas:
>
> https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9bl72d/assertions_in_production_code/
>
> No wonder that DVD players still hang when you insert a DVD 
> with a scratch on it, and I've had a lot of DVD and Bluray 
> players over the last 20 years. No wonder that malware is 
> everywhere.

TIL people still use DVD players all the while my desktops and 
laptops from the last 7+ years have not even had an optical drive.