The Wrong Stuff

[JimBob]

"Walter Bright" <newshound2 at digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
news:i7e7jp$1q7h$1 at digitalmars.com...
> 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).

I read an article once where they were explaining how hospitals put a lot of 
effort designing procedures and protocols so that they minimizes human 
error. We have the phrase "human error" cause we humans are error prone. So 
particulary where peoples lives are at stake it's very worthwhile to do 
everything you can to minimize the possibility of it happening. One example 
was having the pharmacist set out each patients drugs and also have the 
nurse who gives them to the patient check each one. If humans have a 1/100 
fail rate on such tasks, then the double check reduces it to 1/10000.