Python from Wise Guy's Viewpoint

[Joachim Durchholz]

Andrew Dalke wrote:
> If a few rockets blow up for testing then it's still cheaper than
> quintupling the development costs.

Not quite - that was a loss of 500 million dollars. I don't know what 
the software development costs were, so I'm just guessing here, but I 
think it's relatively safe to assume a doubly redundant system would 
already have paid off if it had caught the problem.

The point is that no amount of software technology would have caught the 
problem if the specifications are wrong. I think it would have been more 
successful if there had been some automated specification checking, 
which is safely in the area of theorem proving - which has interesting 
connections to static type checking but is otherwise unrelated to 
programming.

Regards,
Jo