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

[Niklas Holsti <niklas.holsti@tidorum.invalid>]

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.

> We are discussing:
> 
> from Rick Newbie on 11 May 2020:

Yeah, Rick repeated the calumnies about Ferguson's code from the 
"review". I responded because, while I hate C and love Ada, I see it as 
wrong and unhelpful to condemn a program -- and even more so the results 
computed by that program -- merely because it is in C.

>> For sure it would have fewer bugs or even no bugs in Ada.

Which is just an unproven and arrogant assertion.

>> Governments should just force Ada on their workforce.

The U.S. DoD tried that. It mainly raised the hackles of the programmers 
to little good effect.

Rather, universities and other scientific institutions should realize 
that the programs that scientists write and use are as important as 
their journal papers, or their laboratory equipment and procedures, and 
should be subjected to the same level of peer review and criticism. 
Equally, the scientists should be funded to enable them to write quality 
programs, when necessary by paying professionals to implement what the 
scientists specify.

What we can do, as Ada programmers, is to continue to chip away at the 
prevailing idea that "all programs have bugs, what can you do".

> As witnessed by the non-Holsti quotations above, we are discussing
> whether C is too cryptic & too ill-disciplined & insufficiently
> transparent for society to be making multi-ten-trillion-dollar
> reckless bets.
Yes, that was in the original subject domain. I agree that C has 
drawbacks, and Ada advantages. But the discussion started with a 
critique of a particular C program, which was taken as "proof" or 
motivation for avoiding C, and this critique, IMO, was unjust, because I 
don't think that program is as buggy as the critique claimed.

> We are discussing whether having a competing model written in Ada
> would at least be less cryptic, better disciplined, and more
> transparent ...
Very probably it would be, but no-one has volunteered to write it.

Whether it would be more _correct_ was the original question, but that 
question assumes that the C program is _incorrect_, which is how we got 
into the real and claimed bugs in the C program.

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.

> Conversely, the rest of us along this thread are not unrelentingly 
> shilling in vigorous defense of Neil-Ferguson orthodoxy.

I've noticed :-). Feel free to continue, but I think I won't take part 
any more.

-- 
Niklas Holsti
niklas holsti tidorum fi
       .      @       .