There may be defect-free software somewhere (a very simple avionics servo or space probe) but the level of effort required to create it is so many orders of magnitude beyond what goes into commercial software that any programmer's remaining hair stands on end thinking about it
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To give you an idea of how bad the situation is: one of the greatest textbooks in our field had an error in a tiny CS101 algorithm (binary search) for 20 years. This was then fixed, the fix proven to be correct, and then they found a bug in the fix as wellhttps://ai.googleblog.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-all-about-it-nearly.html …
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Or there was that time three years ago when every computer more complex than a graphing calculator (and probably that too) was shown to be completely broken.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(security_vulnerability) …
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There's a theorem in computer science called CAP which basically says, if you could have network where nothing ever went offline, you could do cool stuff. A lot of people get excited and try to do the cool stuff anyway, then rapidly discover that such a network does not exist.
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We're doing the same thing in online systems. We behave as if creating secure software is possible and wire everything together so we can do cool stuff. There's no mechanism to bring the consequences of this decision back to bite the people who make it. They get externalized.
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The one thing the software industry excels at is convincing people that computer bugs are a fact of life, and that the solution for them is even more complex software.
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But is the incompetence state of the art?
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It is in fact industry-leading
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