[TUHS] The Unix shell: a 50-year view

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi,

Jon Steinhart wrote:
> In lectures these days, I'm asking the question "We haven't managed to
> off more than a thousand or so people at a time with a software bug
> yet so what's going to be software's Union Carbide Bhopal moment?"

If buggy code rather than a single bug counts then the software model
written over fifteen years by Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, London,
which has been instrumental in poor UK Government policy decisions on
COVID-19 has easily topped more than a thousand deaths in the net tally.

It was a single 15,000-line file of C, written by a non-programmer.
Eventually, ic.ac.uk released a C++ version which had been worked on by
Microsoft and other volunteers for a month so it could face the public.

   ‘For me the code is not a mess, but it’s all in my head, completely
    undocumented.  Nobody would be able to use it... and I don’t have
    the bandwidth to support individual users.’ ― Neil Ferguson.

Politician Steve Baker MP, a former senior programmer, has been critical
of the public version and commissioned a review by Mike Hearn.  A path
to Hearn's paper starts at
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1323897771510943745.html

And another coder critique is at
https://lockdownsceptics.org/code-review-of-fergusons-model/

The numbers from Ferguson's original pre-release C program were
presented by him to Number 10 and were instrumental in setting the UK on
the path of lockdowns.  ‘...lockdowns are the single worst public health
mistake in the last 100 years’ ― Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine
at Stanford University.

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.