[SystemSafety] Safety Culture redux

[Peter Bernard Ladkin]

It is not just schools. I had a recent experience.

Recent graduate in math with minor in informatics, now working at a company in which programs and
sells WWW-based services. They are using Scala, which has some functional programming facility. He
thinks of using type theory (that is, mathematical type theory, not data typing) to improve the
"correctness" (his word) of the programs. Are we interested?

Here is a simplified dialog:

Me: "Is there a requirements specification of the program you are interested in?"
Him: "What's that?"
Me: "It is a description of what you (or someone) wants the program to do"
Him: "Oh, I don't think so"
Me: "You used the term <correctness>. If there is no description of what you want the program to do,
what did you mean by <correctness>?"
Him: "It means the program is working the way we want it to work"
Me: "But didn't you just tell me there was no description of that?"
Him: "Huh?"

And this from someone who is, as far as I know, quite smart and quite capable. In any case, I did
have the impression he was less interested in this aspect of things than in the prospect of playing
around a bit with type theory. That's fine. (But it's not what I do any more.)

I have had such experiences regularly over thirty years of teaching.

PBL

Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Bielefeld, Germany
MoreInCommon
Je suis Charlie
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs-bi.de





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