[johansch]

(I have absolutely no insight into the software development practices of JAXA and their subcontractors, so I apologize if this is insensitive or uniformed.)

Is this another sign of how bad japanese hardware-oriented companies and organizations are at doing software? Like the organisational software crisis at Toyota?

Or was it a fluke?

[dwc]

I would call it a fluke.

Two things to keep in mind:

* Don't compare JAXA (or anyone else) to NASA at this point. We (the US) have a ton of experience, some of it bought the hard way.

* This isn't Japan's typical performance. They have a nice string of very good space science missions. And don't forget things like the Mars Climate Orbiter[1], where ground based commands sent it through the atmosphere due to a unit mix up.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter

[gammarator]

A recent NASA science satellite had its magnetic torque bars wired in backwards by the contractor, so it's not like this is a thing of the past in the US, either. Thankfully they saw the angular momentum building and shut it down before it spun out of control.

Space is hard, and in many cases you have only one chance to get it right.

[microcolonel]

I hate to feel that way; but yeah most software I see come out of Japan scares me. Outside of legally-critical software, such as automotive control systems: it doesn't seem that there is much focus on quality.

I suspect it has to do with the scale of integrators in the country being much smaller, and lacking in terms of B2B collaboration.

There are some jewels here and there, though. It's probably just a matter of culture. Maybe they're also somewhat isolated from the English and Chinese language leads in software development. I don't think Japanese English language education is very effective. Their popular courses likely don't leave an individual comfortable with technical reading in English.

[b123400]

I work for a Japanese company and sometimes work with people from other companies as well. Most of the people around me avoid English at their best, therefore cannot not access to the knowledge on stackoverflow, also documents in Japanese are usually old or incomplete. Of course it depends on the field (e.g. Japanese documents of ruby on rails are pretty good), I am not sure about aerospace engineering, but I'd not be surprise if most of them feeling uncomfortable reading English.

[krapp]

> Most of the people around me avoid English at their best, therefore cannot not access to the knowledge on stackoverflow, also documents in Japanese are usually old or incomplete.

Is there not a Japanese version of Stack Overflow? Maybe there should be?

[microcolonel]

It wouldn't help. The real problem is that they aren't comfortable with English. The reason English has all the documentation, all of the methodology, all of the literature, all of the community: network effects.

A Japanese Stack Overflow would inevitably be less useful than access to the English Stack Overflow.

[b123400]

This, exactly. Stackoverflow does have Japanese version, and there are sites like Qiita for programmers to share knowledge. But the problem is most of the existing discussions are in English, and a Japanese version of the sites wouldn't help much except all contents are translated (not possible).

[hga]

Outside of legally-critical software, such as automotive control systems: it doesn't seem that there is much focus on quality.

The analysis of Toyoda's software that might have been behind the claimed acceleration/can't stop the engine problems indicates that even there, at least Toyota is all but hopeless.

[schwarrrtz]

Yup.

> There are a large number of functions that are overly complex. By the standard industry metrics some of them are untestable, meaning that it is so complicated a recipe that there is no way to develop a reliable test suite or test methodology to test all the possible things that can happen in it. Some of them are even so complex that they are what is called unmaintainable, which means that if you go in to fix a bug or to make a change, you're likely to create a new bug in the process. Just because your car has the latest version of the firmware -- that is what we call embedded software -- doesn't mean it is safer necessarily than the older one….And that conclusion is that the failsafes are inadequate. The failsafes that they have contain defects or gaps. But on the whole, the safety architecture is a house of cards. It is possible for a large percentage of the failsafes to be disabled at the same time that the throttle control is lost.

> Even a Toyota programmer described the engine control application as “spaghetti-like” in an October 2007 document Barr read into his testimony.

http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-unintende...

[microcolonel]

I have seen analyses of ECM software; and I think they could benefit greatly from a new language.

The priority seems to be reliable real-time computation, and the solution is to calculate everything as a continuous function. Anything that would be a branch is instead a binary mix of the conditions, triggered with a threshold function.

I can think of many ways of structuring programs which are spaghettiish in C, but would yield the desired results in an automotive ECM.

[woodman]

I've tackled some problems that would have ideally, from a performance perspective, been implemented with very deeply nested if()'s. I've found a truth table like layout of bool evaluations to be a nice compromise between maintainability and performance:

  void doit(const tststructptr* in) {
    assert(in);  /* Because we test our code, for safety */
    const tststructptr t = *in;
    if      ( t.t1 &&  t.t2 &&  t.t3) { f1(); }
    else if ( t.t1 && !t.t2 &&  t.t3) { f2(); }
    else if ( t.t1 &&  t.t2 && !t.t3) { f3(); }
    else         /* TODO: Fix, this should never happen */
      releasenerveagent(SLEEPINGQUARTERS);
  }

A long sequence of ternary operators allow for a prettier layout, but is more error prone.

[sitkack]

Software isn't valued as much in Japan, and the pay isn't that high.

[johansch]

Nintendo seems to care quite a lot (I worked at Opera when the two companies built the Wii browser together. Wow. They were incredibly brutally perfectionist, in a painful but somehow admirable way. I've never seen a company doing so many iterations of some particular detail before that.)

But yeah, I agree, whenever a large Japanese company that is not Nintendo does software (at least for consumers), you can pretty much expect a disaster.

(I know there's a small group of startups that do good stuff - I am not talking about them.)

[protomyth]

I think there is an interview where Steve Jobs said as much in regards to Sony and why they didn't own the market before the iPod.

[johansch]

Maybe the reason we think of asian hardware companies unable to build good software is tainted by the fact that one big american hardware company (Apple) managed to do so (build good software, I mean).

I mean, which other large american hardware-centric companies have managed the transition to software well?

[protomyth]

I don't disagree, but I would imagine most base their view on the titans of each country. Apple and Sony got a lot easier to compare in the 2000's and Sony really did have bad software (friggin e-reader). Steve Jobs talked about Sony a lot in interviews. I would bet if we talk South Korean products, Samsung would be the archetype. Microsoft for their part makes nice hardware with pretty good software to back it up.

I haven't used a PlayStation in a long time so I don't know the current state, and I would guess Nest is not helping the US side of the equation. Apple isn't exactly covering itself in glory in the last couple of iOS releases (never mind the "California" series of OS X releases).

[aikinai]

That's cool to hear from the other side; I was at Nintendo for many years and worked closely with the team that directed the browser, so I know exactly who you're talking about (though I wasn't with them for the Wii browser). All Nintendo software is developed like that, and it's still different from how the major American software companies work, but it's very effective for what they do.

Obviously I'm biased, but I agree Nintendo is the only major Japanese company that has any idea how to write software. They also have a legacy of incredibly talented programmers that they respect more than most Japanese companies.

[gozur88]

This. A programmer at a big Japanese company has about the same status as the guy on the loading dock. It's something you do when you're fresh out of school and only as long as you have to.

[eggy]

I agree with @dwc, and would call it a fluke, possibly human error. In any case, there's no need to single out Japan on software.

After Russia, US, and China, Japan has the most satellites in orbit.

China which is always called on its quality control went 16 for 16 launches, and they launch other countries satellites too. They also landed on the moon in 2013. Ironically, they still can't make a ballpoint pen as good as the Japanese,Swiss or German ones due to consumer spending habits [1].

Somebody mentioned South Korea as a comparison. Well they only have 16 compared to Japan's 153 satellites. Japan's space program is scientific, while there are military launches in the US, Russia and China with those budgets hidden to develop such capability.

Japanese robotics are amazingly performant,so they must be doing something right there both hardware and software-wise. Realtime sensor data coupled with mechanics, mechatronics. Funny, anime has robots with rockets, and yet Japan produces the world's top humanoid robots vs. the military and seemingly menacing robots from Boston Dynamics (Alphabet, Google). Although, Atlas is giving Asimo a run for its money.

A lot of satellites were launched off of Soyuz (Russian) rockets too. The UK launched one satellite on its own rocket in 1971, and now piggybacks or rents time on satellites.

Space launches are expensive, technically challenging, and still risky. SpaceX lost the 8 cubesats on the June 28th launch failure. Mechanical, not software, but it shows the risks involved are not isolated to a single country over another, software or hardware.

  [1]  http://www.marketplace.org/2015/12/10/world/why-cant-china-make-good-ballpoint-pen

[sitkack]

Brother wrote the software.

[martin_henk]

Source?

[johansch]

So the rate of downvotes seem to be one per ten minutes since the time of posting.

Why?

[jlgaddis]

I didn't downvote your original comment (just saw it and this one at the same time), but perhaps it has something to do with your blanket categorization of all Japanese software?

[johansch]

Well, if you read my comment properly, you'll realize that what I actually said is that large japanese hardware companies tend to be really bad at software. Nintendo is pretty much the one exception.

[PhantomGremlin]

large japanese hardware companies tend to be really bad at software

That's probably true. But I think your statement is unnecessarily focused on Japan. The following is also true:

large hardware companies tend to be really bad at software