Software "design"
17 08 08 - 01:17
It all started with me having too much free time at my workplace.
So I started researching about homebrew autopilots for model planes, that led me to software that runs avionics onboard the real planes, which ultimately led me to programming practices used to write such software. These two blog posts say most of the things I wanted to write here.
At the end, one thing is clear: designing and writing software must stop being something of artistic value and creative in a sense of expression (which often leads to "broken by design" state) and has to become something that is formally provable to be correct (see also Correctness by construction (1,2)). A good first candidate for this are mission critical systems on which lives depend on - such as airplane avionics. It's good to see that tools for this exist and are freely available. In the light of recent DNS vulnerability, which is there by design, I wonder what would happen if DNS was designed and implemented with such methods.
It was also pleasantly suprised for me to find out that I use some of the methods described in my own work. That's probably why I have free time in the first place ;)
