Harvard vs. von Neumann

[crispin at novell.com (Crispin Cowan)]

IMHO, all this hand wringing is for naught. To get systems that never
fail requires total correctness. Turing tells us that total correctness
is not decidable, so you simply never will get it completely, you will
only get approximations at best.

Having humans write specifications and leaving programming to computers
is similarly a lost cause. At a sufficiently high level, that is asking
the computer to map NP to P, and that isn't going to happen. At a less
abstract level, you are just asking the human to code in a higher level
language. This will help, but will not eliminate the problem that you
just cannot have total correctness.

Programmable Turing machines are great, they do wonderful things, but
total correctness for software simply isn't feasible. People need to
understand that programs are vastly more complex than any other class of
man made artifact ever, , and there fore can never achieve the
reliability of, say, steam engines.

The complexity of software is beginning to approach living organisms.
People at least understand that living things are not totally
predictable or reliable, and s**t will happen, and so you cannot count
on a critter or a plant to do exactly what you want. When computer
complexity clearly exceeds organism complexity, perhaps people will come
to recognize software for what it is; beyond definitive analyzability.

We can never solve this problem. At best we can make it better.

Crispin

-- 
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.               http://crispincowan.com/~crispin/
Director of Software Engineering   http://novell.com
        AppArmor Chat: irc.oftc.net/#apparmor