Ask HN: If your life would hang on code you've written today, would you survive?

2 points by maephisto 7 years ago | 4 comments

Imagine that the code you've written today would be running on a critical life support system. Would it work flawlessly or hit a "setOxigenLevel is undefined" error and kill you? How much would you trust the code you've written today?

chrisbennet 7 years ago |

I wouldn't trust my code for something it wasn't designed to do i.e. operate a critical life support system. As they say, "Price, Quality, Speed: pick two." Perfect code is expensive and isn't worth it to the client.

seren 7 years ago |

I am working on critical medical code. I don't necessarily trust my code more that any other places where I used to work, but I trust the overall organization with proper QA, testing, robustness tests, HW tests, etc.

It is not like I could write some code and it would run tomorrow on a real patient.

Artemix 7 years ago |

I'd never trust my own code, as safe as it can be.

Mistakes and crashes happens, and I'd prefer to always be ready to handle and fix stuff instead of trusting that my own code would perfectly work.

bausshf 7 years ago |

The code I wrote worked fine, but when published it didn't work fine, because of some missing dependencies.

Sometimes it's not just your own code that's going to kill you.