A doctor can be sued for malpractice because the medicines s/he uses are certified by the federal government. An engineer can be sued because s/he does no building, only planning. If the building goes according to spec and the building fails, the design (aka, the engineer) is at fault.

Hence, if compilers and toolkits are certified by some board/government, and I use them, and my software fails ... I am liable. If I create software that allows for a known hack, such as buffer overflow, to happen ... I am liable. If I make a design and it is faithfully executed, but the application fails ... I am liable.

I think that programmer liability is a very good thing. It would require that programmers be certified, similar to a bar or CPA exam. I would take one and accept its results.

It would require that the pace of innovation be slowed down so that advances are scrutinized. I would prefer this. (Think about it this way - would you want to go into an operating room knowing your doctor is using a technique he developed and no-one else has scrutinized?)

It would require that there is some standardization in the world. As far as I know, there is no perlmonk who would vote against this idea. (Some of us might be out of jobs, but I know I don't like retrofitting interfaces ... do you?)

I think that board-certifying programmers is an excellent idea. That way, employers have a guarantee on what that candidate can do.

The first thing that needs to be certified is not products, but people.

------
We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Don't go borrowing trouble. For programmers, this means Worry only about what you need to implement.

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.