Comment by irthomasthomas
14 days ago
Is this incident not reason enough? Astronauts in space are needing remote support to debug it, and taking up priceless mission time.
14 days ago
Is this incident not reason enough? Astronauts in space are needing remote support to debug it, and taking up priceless mission time.
Sure, but bespoke software isn't necessarily going to be more reliable.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
> The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they’ve been fixed.
This quote is completely and totally irrelevant. Nobody is saying they should code a new Outlook. If they did code something, it would be significantly smaller in scope and rigorously tested like spacebound programs in the past were. "New space-engineering-grade code created with actual engineering practices" is absolutely going to be more reliable than "old bloated commercial shitware". But I guess software engineering is a lost art, so it can't be helped.
It's also going to take a hell of a lot longer and cost more than buying an Outlook license. If I was lead on that project, you'd have an uphill battle trying to convince me that spending $100k+ on an email solution unless you can point to specific, serious deficiencies in the existing off the shelf solutions.
Software Engineering is far from a lost art: part of the practice is intelligently making cost-benefit decisions.
5 replies →
Alpine and mutt are about as far from bespoke as it gets. Both are far less likely to suffer from bugs than outlook.
Alpine and Mutt are about 20 and 30 years old, respectively.
And that problem would go away with a 30 year-old solution?
That problem would be much less likely with a minimalist battle tested OSS solution whose maintainers and users have decidedly different priorities than those governing something like outlook or even thunderbird.
The higher the stakes the more valuable minimalism becomes.