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by dickstrawng 350 days ago
I don't know how comfortable I feel throwing around terms like computer science and software engineering. I know a lot of people who can program but I would never have them design a medical system or anything having to do with life or death situations.
1 comments
gosub100 350 days ago
the keyword there is "design". systems engineers/architects design those things, not coders. And they are made safe by entire teams of academics, clinicians, engineers, testers, scientists, and even lawyers.
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kmoser 350 days ago
I would argue that even if other people have designed an entire system and "all" that is left to do is to write the code, things can go very wrong if the coder isn't good at designing their code well (e.g. to be efficient, robust, etc.). It's "design" all the way down; there is no imaginary line where design stops and coding starts.
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gosub100 350 days ago
thats true, if there were one sigle "coder" who was cloistered away from the team and came back when s/he claimed the requirements were met and the task was complete. Whereas, in FDA (and presumably FAA/DoD) regulated designs, a massive team is following a rigid SDLC including code reviews for best practices.

Now, technically the FDA doesn't force that, all they specify is that some standard procedure must be followed, and written evidence must be produced upon demand showing that the procedure is followed. So you could contrive an example where a cowboy coder made his own sqrt() and completely broke it, and that somehow led to the death or injury to a patient, or an elevator going into free-fall. or a fuze detonating. sure. Is that likely to happen? absolutely not.

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kmoser 350 days ago
> a massive team is following a rigid SDLC including code reviews for best practices

Regardless of how thoroughly a system is planned in advance, programmers are not automatons who mindlessly fill in the last few blanks. They must make choices about the code they write, and that is absolutely a part of the overall design. If that code fails a code review, well, then it gets rewritten, but that's ancillary to my point: programming is design (albeit at a lower level than the overall system design).

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