[prog] State of software engineering profession

[Mary]

On Mon, Apr 14, 2003, Robert J. Hansen wrote:
> When we did things according to theory, what wound up happening was we
> got design documents with subtle contradictions, corner cases which
> were left unhandled... i.e., we found bugs in the design.  Sometimes
> the bugs could be fixed while still keeping the design intact; and
> other times we had to totally break the design.  Sometimes, small and
> subtle changes had catastrophic effects.  So the only sensible way to
> design the software was to _write_ the software, and let the source
> code be the design.

People who use formal methods to design or describe programs
(mathematical proofs that the input and the program produce the desired
output) have been known to spend as much time debugging their models and
proof as others do their program.

-Mary