Civil engineering rules, safety margins and procedures have been established through the years as people died from their absence. The practice of civil engineering is arguably millennia old.
Software is too new to have the same lessons learned and enacted into law.
The problem isn’t that software doesn’t have the kind of practices and procedures that would prevent these kinds of errors, (see the space shuttle code for example), it is that we haven’t formalized their application into law, and the “terms of service” that protects software makers has so far prevented legal case law from ensuring liability if you don’t use them.
Software engineering, compared to other engineering disciplines, has had a massive effect on the world in an incredibly short amount of time.
Civil engineering rules, safety margins and procedures have been established through the years as people died from their absence. The practice of civil engineering is arguably millennia old.
Software is too new to have the same lessons learned and enacted into law.
The problem isn’t that software doesn’t have the kind of practices and procedures that would prevent these kinds of errors, (see the space shuttle code for example), it is that we haven’t formalized their application into law, and the “terms of service” that protects software makers has so far prevented legal case law from ensuring liability if you don’t use them.
Software engineering, compared to other engineering disciplines, has had a massive effect on the world in an incredibly short amount of time.