Jules is a freelance consultant specialising in safety-critical systems, mathematical software, and compilers and languages. He has been writing, teaching and speaking for 25 years, and conducts frequent lectures and workshops. He is the author of Extreme Reliability: Programming Like Your Life Depends On It, and is the originator of Problem Space Analysis.
He lives in North-East Scotland.
In the 1950s and 1960s, when we first started writing software at industrial scale (and “computer” was a job, not a machine), programming was really hard! It was slow, error-prone, and demanded complex rituals and incantations to make anything work. Back then, software was a byword for missed deadlines, blown budgets, and machines going haywire. In short, software was a mess.Seventy years on, w...
No matter how much advancement we see in programming tools and hardware technology, software development remains resolutely difficult. The preoccupation of today’s developers is exactly what it was fifty years ago: how can we create software which works reliably, and how we can extend it without breaking it? We just accept that software is inherently flawed, that all software contains bugs like or...