Post #2189070
2026-04-02 21:48 UTC
Replies (3)
-
@ambv@mastodon.social 2026-04-02 23:23
@jacob@social.jacobian.org Responding to the thread as a whole, I think code readability will matter just as much as cockpit black boxes matter. The universe is against us even with bug-free hardware and software. Even the perfect self-driving car will kill some people. The perfect AI doctor will lose some patients. The perfect automated factory will assemble some lemons. We will need to be able to learn why and how it happened. Step by step. So, logs and readable code. Otherwise trusting automation is impossible
-
@glyph@mastodon.social 2026-04-03 04:53
@jacob@social.jacobian.org I think this is a subtle category error, in the sense that "readability" (and "code quality" more generally) is a transitive adjective. Readable to whom? High quality according to whose taste? We strive for an "objective" sense of code quality because the audience we are usually addressing is the pool of potential candidates who may become future maintainers of the code, and that's a nebulous group. But, that group's nebulousness eventually must be removed as it becomes "the current team"
-
@rami@chaos.social 2026-04-03 14:53
@jacob@social.jacobian.org But aren't we then just shifting all the complexity, skill requirement and quality concerns to the business logic specification language, which will maybe be less verbose than code, but certainly not easier to reason about and write perfect specifications in? The maintenance burden of software isn't just high because there's a bug in that manually-written for loop, it's mostly because requirements weren't clear enough or change.