[maxxxxx]

I don't think you can compare software to other disciplines like medical, air transportation or architecture. These areas are well understood and pretty mature and move pretty slowly. If we ran air transportation like software somebody would already have self flying airplanes in service. They would crash from time to time though. I personally like the imperfection of software development and the freedom to imagine new things. If we want to be more mature we also have to accept much slower development cycles and innovation will be slower.

[masklinn]

> I don't think you can compare software to other disciplines like medical, air transportation or architecture. These areas are well understood and pretty mature and move pretty slowly.

Architecture maybe. Air transportation is barely a century old, though you could make the argument that it's a offshoot of other industrial engineering disciplines.

When it comes to medicine however, while modern medicine is older than computer science it's not by much, and what's called medicine until the late 19th or early 20th century is as similar to modern medicine as computers of the early 20th century (aka rooms of people with rulers and mechanical calculators) are to computers of the second half.

And medicine has in fact changed at a pretty frenetic pace, the "miasma theory" was only vanquished circa 1880~1890, and we can now sample and edit living beings at coffee-cup price levels.

[maxxxxx]

I still would argue that medical is moving much slower than software. I work in medical devices and simple experiments can take years to get done once humans are involved. In software we would get the result in a few days or weeks. I am not advocating easing the restrictions in human experimentation but these rules definitely slow down progress.

[Silhouette]

I am not advocating easing the restrictions in human experimentation but these rules definitely slow down progress.

They surely slow down the work, but whether they slow down useful progress is a different question. Given the amount of time and money that depend on software systems today, as well as the more general effect of software on our quality of life, poor quality software costs society as a whole a great deal. If we built our software more slowly and carefully but also with higher reliability and fewer issues with security, privacy and so on, would we really be worse off?

[maxxxxx]

"If we built our software more slowly and carefully but also with higher reliability and fewer issues with security, privacy and so on, would we really be worse off?"

Probably not. Personally I often enjoy the Wild West attitude of a lot of software development but on the other hand this industry has a really short memory and reinvents the wheel every few years. So yes, it would probably be a good idea if we held ourselves to higher standards and adopted best practices that often have been around for a long time.

[jb1991]

> I don't think you can compare software to other disciplines like medical, air transportation or architecture.

Why not? After all, the safety of a pacemaker is largely because of the software it runs. In many cases, medical safety and software safety are nearly the same. And throughout our world, this is true in many industries. Driving. Banking. Our software today is our safety for nearly everything. It will only continue to grow this way.

[maxxxxx]

I know a little about pacemaker software. They are super conservative and very reluctant to change. For a good reason! But it's certainly not an area where you will get much innovation from. I bet there would no AWS or cloud if they had to file every incident and environment change to an FDA equivalent.

[hellofunk]

Interesting. Let's discuss this further during your office hours?