I think programmers should re-evaluate the stakes that they're playing with. Even seemingly inconsequential things can have pretty large impacts at the scale that programmers operate. For example, if a form that you write doesn't properly support unicode characters then you might have just locked out millions of people from non western countries from using your software.
And even worse, if you're building a "tiny low stakes" piece of a much larger software then you might end up accepting money from those paying customers who can no longer use your software because your form doesn't work for them. (I've had this happen to me personally). And then people don't bother fixing it because it's only 0.01% of the userbase.
But isn't that part of the poor comparison with other sorts of engineering? If I build a bridge or design a machine, I have a pretty good idea of who will use it and for what, and it's engineered for those use cases, and some reasonable edge cases. Plenty of medical and chemical engineering isn't tested on anything close to the breadth of humanity that could be harmed or excluded from using it.
There's plenty of "engineered" products that are designed in ways that don't support unicode or international electrical systems, or other factors that exclude "millions of people from non western countries", but they also just don't sell those products outside of western countries.
Just because I put something on the internet doesn't mean I'm thus required to support literally the entire planet's use of it, and I don't think that's "stakes". Sure, if your company has a Korean division and you forget to have Unicode support, that's a problem, but if you work for a regional company in Virginia, it doesn't seem like some failing of professional responsibility to not support Unicode in my forms.
Did you mean english speaking countries? Because most European countries (that I would assume are part of the "West") require unicode support as names and last names include non-ASCII letters.
Also, if you work for a "regional company" in Virginia and you don't support unicode you're likely excluding 11.5% of the Latino population that do make use of non-ASCII characters in their names and Asians, that are 7% of the population. So, yes, it is a serious professional failure to do that, even in "Virginia".
You're somewhat right, though I was just parroting the parent comment's example. If anything, you're pointing out what a terrible example it is. If you drop unicode support, that's not "not thinking about your immediate users", it's shipping a pretty broken product in general in a way that's easily fixable in most projects, which transcends the "is it engineering" line by a good bit.
That said, I'd be curious what percentage of people with non-English names actually require Unicode for their names. Not every Asian or Latin person, or even most of them I know, use non-ASCII characters in their name, and very few businesses or applications require you to enter a full legal name that needs to be accurate the the language used to name you. I work at a company with a large amount of international employees and I'm not sure I've seen anyone with a non-ASCII character in their name, and I'm pretty sure Active Directory and Slack support Unicode. So while it would be a mistake to not have Unicode support, I am curious how much it would actually cause an issue. It would be inconsiderate to not support it on a form, but there's plenty of businesses who could probably operate just fine with only Latin characters.
You haven't seen them because they have already been burned by stupid systems that will not take non-ASCII characters so they don't even try, the most common Spanish/Portuguese first name is José but I doubt you'll find a José at your job.
Sure, but then that's a very loose meaning of "requires" unicode support if all the people who "require" it probably aren't even going to try to use it even if you support it.
Ironically, isn't part of the issue that most "engineered" keyboards in the US don't have any innate way to type those, and thus require your "programmed" OS or application to have the support needed to even type those characters with some chord of keys?
So wouldn't you agree that in a sense, the stakes for programming is much higher? Because you can have a global impact just by putting something on the internet, I think programmers should take more care into the work that they do and not less.
Not at all. There's only a handful of bridges over the river near me that I could use to get to my friend's house. There's only one AC unit in my house that's keeping my house in a livable temperature. A failure in almost any "engineered" thing in my life would have more impact than the loss of literally any programmed thing in my life, and the only programmed things that come close are treated more like engineering projects in my experience.
Regardless, none of that was the point I was making. You're claiming that because code could run anywhere, that it's therefore every programmer's responsibility to make it work everywhere, because that's "engineering". My point is that Engineering is nothing like that - most actual engineering is of a vastly more defined and constrained scope than most software. My mechanical engineering friends spend years building, say, an AC unit that only is ever sold to something as niche as hotels within a certain latitude range in North America.
Do engineers have to be more robust? Often yes. Should some software also be developed to that level of rigor? Yes. Should all or even most software be required or even expected to have that rigor? No.
It’s high stakes in the sense that leveraged trading is high stakes. One person can provide value to a million customers, but it’s unrealistic to expect that person to be able to cover one million people’s worth of edge cases.
So what’s better, keeping the ability for one person to have an outsized impact in improving others lives along with some caveat emptor, or bolting down the industry to the point that one line of code costs several hundred dollars?
> So wouldn't you agree that in a sense, the stakes for programming is much higher?
That doesn't mean the stakes are higher. It means the potential upsides are higher.
The potential downsides are also much lower (a bad website will rarely kill someone).
The combination of these two incentivize bringing in as many people as possible, even if standards suffer because there's almost no downside (civilizationally speaking, companies do occasionally lose quite a bit of money).
That's probably true although I think eventually, that kind of callous line of thinking might actually get someone indirectly killed because programmers don't worry about the impact of their code.
A less severe (although in my opinion still live changing) problem is having an unusual name making it harder to book flights. Another example where having a NULL license plate got someone thousands of tickets [1]. Or IP addresses getting mapped to locations where they actually don't come from and now someone's house is getting searched because "their IP had illicit activity".
Coding probably won't kill someone but I still don't think it's low stakes.
The real sad is that there's nearly no defense against this, other than scanning codepage of all text you see. At least punycode is available for domain names in URL bar if turned on.
And even worse, if you're building a "tiny low stakes" piece of a much larger software then you might end up accepting money from those paying customers who can no longer use your software because your form doesn't work for them. (I've had this happen to me personally). And then people don't bother fixing it because it's only 0.01% of the userbase.