Comment by amelius
5 hours ago
If normal warranty rules applied to software, then software companies would be out of business very quickly.
Maybe with formal verification the laws around that can change?
5 hours ago
If normal warranty rules applied to software, then software companies would be out of business very quickly.
Maybe with formal verification the laws around that can change?
Software is buggy when people are more willing to buy the cheaper buggy software vs the higher price of more robust software.
When people want more robust software, they pay for it and it is delivered. None of the modern world would work without immense amounts of highly robust software you don't even think about, from your bank, to the airplane you fly on.
I don't understand what you're trying to say here. If I sell a car that doesn't start half of the time, I can just say "well people pay more for cars that always work, you chose to spend less so you got what you deserved"?
For used vehicles, we already have that in practice; when you sell a vehicle “as is,” that’s putting a buyer on notice that that they’re going to bear the risk of future failure.
Similarly, when you buy a cooler at Wal-Mart for $25, you know it’s not going to perform the same as a $250 Yeti model.
1 reply →
They're saying the software that makes the car start was more expensive than the software that allows you to play music in the car.
I guess in a cynical way it very well might, as it fits the bureaucratic and political mold perfectly.
Businesses would be able to rubber stamp a "Verification of Correctness", and the government could parade this political achievement around to people not knowing better, satiating their hunger for better quality software (supposedly).
In the meantime, programs would indeed feel like they became better. Except that'd be less due to them being formally verified, and more because generating all the formal verification artifacts would practically require using agents, and those agents would incidentally produce better work than what's currently typical. Not the least because people would more readily pose tough requirements to them, without regard for the difficulty.
Eventually we'd then get back where we started, with programs being flawed, just flawed in a consistent way from some arbitrary perspective (so as to still pass formal verification, of course). Since regulation would be obsessed with the rubber stamp rather than anything else, the businesses would continue to float about as usual. The only thing that'd change would be the nature of the issues.