Invisible wrote:
> software don't just accept random hangups and crashes as an unavoidable 
> fact of life. They fix them. All of them.

*Probably*, yes.

It's not a matter of "unavoidable fact of life". It's simply a cost to 
benefit ratio. If over the lifetime of your computer you spend (say) six 
hours waiting for it to reboot, or you could spend 60 hours finding and 
fixing the bug that's causing that problem, what do you do?

> Anyway, embedded programming and safety-critical programming are both 
> very specialist.

Not especially, no. Indeed, I bet if you go around your house, you'll find 
you have more embedded applications in your house than you have desktop 
applications.  (Don't forget to count the BIOS, the NIC card, the sound 
card, etc in your PC. ;-)

> I doubt many people will ever see such code in their 
> lives.

Sure. And few people will start their own companies. That doesn't mean 
business law is a specialized endeavor.

 > And I guess you could argue that games programming is pretty
> specialist too... 

I would say so, yes.

> "Most" programs, after all, are either desktop 
> applications or web applications, and most of them just push data around.

Hard to say, really. Certainly the *easy* programs are desktop and web apps.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Understanding the structure of the universe
    via religion is like understanding the
     structure of computers via Tron.

Post a reply to this message