The recent scene at the customer-facing web pages of a major US bank:
The software field has apparently forgotten about using fixed-precision math in business applications—lessons that were already well known by the time COBOL came online in the 1950s.
Mistakes happen, but this one really should have been trapped long before it saw the light of day (and possibly committed a bank to bogus interest-rate payments). Alas, a field which denigrates and ignores its hard-won knowledge base is doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past perennially.
Isn't it time for some formal entry requirements in software development? People who don't care to learn a field probably shouldn't practice in it. And people who must hire its practitioners could probably use the help.
For more on this thread, read the technical background and related notes ⇒ here.
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