8.10b - first impression and questions

[Ignazio Palmisano]

Derek Broughton wrote:
> Knapp wrote:
> 
>> On Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 11:55 AM, Eberhard Roloff <tuxebi at gmx.de> wrote:
> 
>>> I have yet to see perfect software. Even Linux does not offer it and
>>> imho nobody will ever be able to write a perfect solution.
>> Really there is a lot of perfect software, just not much for the home
>> user because it costs to much to produce. 
> 
> Really?  Anything more complex than "Hello World" is likely to have errors. 
> Even mission-critical, lives-at-risk, software was found to have errors
> during the Y2K fiasco (not that it was likely that many of those errors
> would have broken anything - but the software was not perfect).
> 
>> What is not perfect on the 
>> home systems is often the hardware and other peoples software that it
>> must interface with anyway. When you release a piece of software it
>> must not work with just one type of hardware but 1000s! It is really
>> impossible to test 1000s of possible hardware types that you might
>> have your software run on and it is not cost effective ether. Zero
>> fault software is the sort of stuff that NASA uses.
>  
> Like the lander software for Mars missions :-)
> 
> You're essentially right, I just can't agree that there's much perfect
> sotware out there.

Seconded. I might mention the floating point bug that made the Ariane 
launcher fail some years ago... and there are books out there listing 
examples of programs as long as 5 lines that look perfectly innocent and 
are instead riddled with bugs. Perfect software is as expensive as the 
speed of light is reachable... you finish the money around .95 perfect :)
I.