Re: Not to incite a language war but apparently the Corona lockdown was based on 13 year old undocumented C-Code

[Optikos <ZUERCHER_Andreas@outlook.com>]

On Wednesday, May 13, 2020 at 4:48:35 PM UTC-5, Niklas Holsti wrote:
> On 2020-05-14 0:02, Optikos wrote:
> > On Wednesday, May 13, 2020 at 3:29:13 PM UTC-5, Niklas Holsti wrote:
> >> On 2020-05-13 21:58, Optikos wrote:
> 
>     [snip]
> 
> >>> 2.2 million deaths in the USA and a half million deaths in the UK
> >>> due to Covid-19 [...] were not a miscalculation, but rather a
> >>> perfectly accurate calculation. Okey dokey, then.
> >>
> >> You seem to have misunderstood what we are discussing. The question is
> >> if Ferguson's results were influenced by errors (bugs) in Ferguson's
> >> code, not if Ferguson's assumptions or mathematical models are realistic
> >> or correct for this pandemic.
> > 
> > No, we are not discussing only your dictates and narrow reframings.
> 
> Feel free to discuss what you like, but in this sub-thread your post 
> asked when a particular bug in Ferguson's code was corrected, so clearly 
> you too were talking about bugs.

No, we are discussing whether even the maintainers on GitHub of the evolved code have deep insight into the big picture of whether the design is doing what it ought to do for society to make multi-ten-trillion-dollar bets on infectious diseases.  Yes, they have identified & fixed little nit bugs here and there in the microcosm, but this thread's main focus is whether C's lack of lucid expressivity of meaningful abstractions precludes maintainers and critics from seeing bigger-picture maldesigns and whether this code is worthy of the high degree of trust that the whole planet entrusts it with.

Clearly, several maldesigns exist because for multiple infectious diseases over a decade, this code is producing excessively inflated projections that are nowhere close to the eventually observed reality.  The problem isn't that C precludes seeing one-liner or one-block or one-function bugs (although it might partially inhibit such visibility).  The problem is that obliquely jamming the design into C does not foster Ada's more-sophisticated attention to type, subtype, and task expressivity of the intended design.  (A next-gen Ada would focus on expanding out more categories of highly-lucid intended-design capture.)

TL;DR; The bug fixing in C has focused on the bark on the tree because it is difficult to see the forest.

> It's good that Ferguson's code is now openly available and being cleaned 
> up. So far, I haven't seen any credible claims that the cleaned-up code 
> is giving radically different results.

See above.