[Jtsummers]

It's getting better, but hardware companies tend to view software as second-class. They think it's "easy", though they're finally accepting that it's not. It's taken decades of fatalities, cost overruns, and missed deadlines for them to realize this, but they're realizing it.

[nerdponx]

> fatalities

If someone dies because of a preventable bug in your software, shouldn't that be considered manslaughter?

Obviously you formed a corporation in order to shield yourself from legal action (among other things). Fine, so you personally don't get charged with manslaughter. But in that case the corporation should be charged, and if convicted should be sentenced to the corporate equivalent of 25 years in jail. That would be a strong enough incentive to care about software. Of course, it never works like that in real life.

Is this as ridiculous as it sounds to me or is my outrage misplaced somehow?

[pjmlp]

You are completely right.

As Hoare so elegantly described at his Turing award speech, regarding Algol compilers, back in 1981.

"Many years later we asked our customers whether they wished us to provide an option to switch off these checks in the interests of efficiency on production runs. Unanimously, they urged us not to--they already knew how frequently subscript errors occur on production runs where failure to detect them could be disastrous. I note with fear and horror that even in 1980, language designers and users have not learned this lesson. In any respectable branch of engineering, failure to observe such elementary precautions would have long been against the law. "

Full speech here:

http://www.labouseur.com/projects/codeReckon/papers/The-Empe...

[Jtsummers]

It's as ridiculous as it sounds, but they go through a lot of effort on the corporate side to make sure they're in the clear. It's a lot of CYA paperwork and stuff demonstrating they've done what they could have. And then out-of-court civil suit settlements that are sealed so no one knows the details and can't form class action suits or coordinate well enough to initiate a criminal investigation (their family member's accident seems like a one-off to them, they don't know the extent of the problems).