Everyone who writes safety critical software should read this

[eles]

On Friday, 1 November 2013 at 13:52:01 UTC, Wyatt wrote:
> On Thursday, 31 October 2013 at 21:36:11 UTC, eles wrote:

> much more honest because it squarely puts the blame where it 
> belongs, viz. with the programmer who made the error. The

That's in an ideal world. When different people work on the same 
code base, it is not so easy to tell who made the error. Look at 
a race condition when neither of two or three developers takes 
the mutex. Who made the error then? All that you have is a buggy 
program (btw, error implies something about being systematic, 
while bugs are not necessarily) or a program with errors. But, 
telling *who* made the error is not that simple. And, in most of 
the cases, would be also quite useless. We do not hunt people, 
but bugs :p (sorry, it sounds better than hunting errors :)

> testing may convincingly demonstrate the presence of bugs, but 
> can never demonstrate their absence.

Everybody knows that. Alas, testing is not the silver bullet, but 
at least is a bullet. Just imagine how software shipped without 
any testing will behave: "it compiles! let's ship it!" 
Corporations are not chasing the phyilosophical perfections, they 
are pragmatic. The thing that somewhat works and they have on the 
table is testing. In a perfect world, you'd have perfect 
programmers, perfect programs. The thing is, you are not living 
in a perfect world. Tests are not perfect neither but are among 
the best that you can get.