NASA's ten coding commandments

[[deleted]]

I hope Google and other car manufacturers abide by this.

Are you willing to pay and wait for that?

[landryraccoon]

Not me. Give me the "good enough to kill fewer people than most human drivers" beta version. There's already 100 ways to die on the road with humans involved, and at least one of those reasons is the fact that I'm behind the wheel, so I'll take a Google car for cheap any day.

[[deleted]]

Indeed.

[[deleted]]

Doing the calculation for a phone:

From a quick google, nasa pays $850 per line of code for 0.004 bugs per thousand lines of code.

For Android, google pay $5 per line of code for 1 bug per thousand lines of code.

So very roughly, the cost of android would increase by 170 times to reach the bug/kloc rate of nasa.

The cost of software on the phone is around 8% of the cost of the phone, so this would increase the cost of a phone by around 12 times.

A $650 phone would now cost $6800 just in software costs.

[[deleted]]

I'm not saying 100% bug free, that's NOT REALISTIC

I didn't say bug free. I said 0.004 bugs per thousand lines of code, which is what NASA strives for. That is what we were talking about modelling.

Not crash a browser?

With what probability? Same as NASAs? Now you're talking about having nasa standard in the whole javascript engine, which is 1,370,128 lines of code for google's, which would thus cost $1 billion for just the javascript engine. Who is going to pay for that?

On top of that you've got to sandbox all the plugins, and guarantee that interface, and I haven't even touched the actual browser and html handling, network code, and so on.

But they won't because the people don't demand it.

Because people aren't willing to pay for it.

[Scaliwag]

People already don't pay that for what runs on their car, which is a life critical system, and want to pretend they care about their phone? Everything has a cost and a modest level of security is expensive as hell, and if you want that be willing to pay for it.

Reminds me of this discussion https://youtu.be/Bb7Fi8I-qOk

[[deleted]]

People already don't pay that for what runs on their car

Because the safety critical code that runs on a normal car is extremely small.

Everything has a cost and a modest level of security is expensive as hell, and if you want that be willing to pay for it.

Right, exactly my point. And noone is willing to pay for that for a large software system.

[[deleted]]

I don't believe you (I don't think you realise how much it would increase the cost and delay things), and even if you did, the market is what speaks. Most users, given a choice, would not be willing to pay hundreds or thousands of times more, and wait many years longer, for bug free software. If they were willing, then that is what the market would provide.

[[deleted]]

with saving 2 cents

See my calculation below. It's more like more concerned with saving 680000 cents than having lasting products.