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

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

[Jon Steinhart]

Wow.  This is a terrible paper.  It's full of of incorrect, unsubstiantiated,
and meaningless statements.  It's so bad in my opinion that I'm not sorry
that I dropped my ACM membership a while ago.  These folks really needed an
editor.  The paper annoys me so much that I've decided to write a lengthy
note to the authors which I'll post here once I'm done.

Jon

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

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Henry,

> I'm going to come right out ahead of any path to the contrary and say
> that I'm in favor of the lockdowns that were enacted in the US.

Death-by-bug is OT enough for TUHS to begin with, though ‘entertaining’.
Can we try and keep the thread to that together with any argument for
why a bug caused net deaths.

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.

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

[Henry Bent]

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I'm going to come right out ahead of any path to the contrary and say that
I'm in favor of the lockdowns that were enacted in the US.  I very plainly
do not trust the population here to make reasonable decisions, even in the
face of clearly presented evidence to the contrary.  Furthermore, I have
not seen any evidence that US lawmakers acted according to any model
whatsoever.

The evidence being what it is, I applaud UK lawmakers for acting as they
did, and our hindsight evidence can only support increased funding for
statistical modeling.  It wasn't a widely regarded field before this and I
can only hope that its support improves after this.

-Henry

On Sat, 10 Jul 2021 at 08:02, Ralph Corderoy <ralph@inputplus.co.uk> wrote:

> 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.
>

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Re: [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.