Review of The Problem With Software
Shoshana Marcus · ACM SIGACT News · 2020
As we become progressively more dependent on computers and the software they run, the threat of bugs in computer systems is more and more concerning. This book begins by describing attacks of different viruses in 1988 and 2014 that exploited similar programming errors. These vulnerabilities in the respective programs resulted from simple mistakes and their fixes seemed trivial. It is astounding to realize that in the intervening twenty five years no standard methodology was implemented to detect this sort of problem and that the programming community did not learn from their collective mistakes made in the recent past. Upon reflection, this seems to be the accepted norm in software engineering. As the author points out, "Software has few of the hallmarks of engineering where a body of knowledge is built up over time based on rigorous experimentation." This book is a quest to understand why that is so and to explore how we can begin to rectify this wrong.