[xmprt]

So wouldn't you agree that in a sense, the stakes for programming is much higher? Because you can have a global impact just by putting something on the internet, I think programmers should take more care into the work that they do and not less.

[noirbot]

Not at all. There's only a handful of bridges over the river near me that I could use to get to my friend's house. There's only one AC unit in my house that's keeping my house in a livable temperature. A failure in almost any "engineered" thing in my life would have more impact than the loss of literally any programmed thing in my life, and the only programmed things that come close are treated more like engineering projects in my experience.

Regardless, none of that was the point I was making. You're claiming that because code could run anywhere, that it's therefore every programmer's responsibility to make it work everywhere, because that's "engineering". My point is that Engineering is nothing like that - most actual engineering is of a vastly more defined and constrained scope than most software. My mechanical engineering friends spend years building, say, an AC unit that only is ever sold to something as niche as hotels within a certain latitude range in North America.

Do engineers have to be more robust? Often yes. Should some software also be developed to that level of rigor? Yes. Should all or even most software be required or even expected to have that rigor? No.

[interstice]

It’s high stakes in the sense that leveraged trading is high stakes. One person can provide value to a million customers, but it’s unrealistic to expect that person to be able to cover one million people’s worth of edge cases.

So what’s better, keeping the ability for one person to have an outsized impact in improving others lives along with some caveat emptor, or bolting down the industry to the point that one line of code costs several hundred dollars?

[Kamq]

> So wouldn't you agree that in a sense, the stakes for programming is much higher?

That doesn't mean the stakes are higher. It means the potential upsides are higher.

The potential downsides are also much lower (a bad website will rarely kill someone).

The combination of these two incentivize bringing in as many people as possible, even if standards suffer because there's almost no downside (civilizationally speaking, companies do occasionally lose quite a bit of money).

[xmprt]

> A bad website will rarely kill someone

That's probably true although I think eventually, that kind of callous line of thinking might actually get someone indirectly killed because programmers don't worry about the impact of their code.

A less severe (although in my opinion still live changing) problem is having an unusual name making it harder to book flights. Another example where having a NULL license plate got someone thousands of tickets [1]. Or IP addresses getting mapped to locations where they actually don't come from and now someone's house is getting searched because "their IP had illicit activity".

Coding probably won't kill someone but I still don't think it's low stakes.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/null-license-plate-landed-one-ha...