Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ryanmarsh 3446 days ago
NASA has a culture of safety and redundancy ad nauseam because people are indoctrinated into it, not because their hires have an innate proclivity for it.

It is not fair to judge Lattner's ability or commitment to safety based upon Xcode and Swift. One of these predates him, the other is the result of his decisions (no doubt) but also countless decisions of others, including those above his pay grade at Apple.

Xcode is basically the evolution of something designed for NEXT. Swift is a solution to various problems in application development. I'm not aware if he (et.al.) had real time processing or safety critical devices in mind with 3.0.2.

2 comments

> NASA has a culture of safety and redundancy ad nauseam because people are indoctrinated

I'm not claiming Lattner is missing some innate ability -- it just appears they're putting someone in charge who has never been exposed to this mindset. Maybe they have a culture or other leaders already in place who can foster this within the team.

> It is not fair to judge Lattner's ability or commitment to safety based upon Xcode and Swift.

To be fair, we cannot judge Lattner's ability or commitment to safety at all, because he has no publicly-known experience with safety-critical systems.

Perhaps he has relevant experience that's not public. And if it turns out he has no relevant experience, I'm not saying he can't learn. It's just strange for Tesla to put someone in charge who will be learning on the job.

Probably not, but the WWDC session about real time audio used Swift on their presentation.

http://devstreaming.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2016/507n0zrhzxdzm...

"Real-time" audio doesn't involve human critical systems.
Of course not, but part of the sentence said

> I'm not aware if he (et.al.) had real time processing