Comments by "Vitaly L" (@vitalyl1327) on "Developers Blamed For The Post Office Horizon Scandal?" video.

Developers deserve a lot of blame here. Of course they are not responsible for the corrupt procurement process, not responsible for the "never admit any failures" MBA culture, but they really built an exceptionally crappy system, even by the British standards. And for this they must be hounded and mocked. Far too often code monkeys get away without their incompetence being exposed and laughed at. This is the time to beat some fear into the bad pseudo-engineers and to remind them what respinsibility is.
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@davidjulitz7446 systems like this should never be bult without using formal methods. And formal proofs woupd have demonstrated very early on that the design itself is inadequate. There is no point in chasing and fixing small bugs when the overall design is utterly broken from the very beginning.
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@davidjulitz7446 it is a distributed system, formal proofs of soundness are indeed possible (TLA+ or simialr). And yes, lack of QA loop is also developers fault. They shoudl have raised an alarm and decline to work in such conditions.
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@davidjulitz7446 you do not need to prove the whole system, just the distributed communication part. This is what TLA+ is for. And this way it'd quicly becone apparent that there exist a number of conditions where network lag or breakdown compromise transactions integrity. Every communicating system must go through such a proof. And we do it for quite complicated, heavily distributed designs.
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Complex-schmomplex, they built Horizon in a Visual freaking Basic 6, without ever even thinking about boring details like ACID. It was doomed to be a failure through and through, not just a "complex system with a few bugs".
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