From: ganesh@edu.utah.cs.bliss (Ganesh C. Gopalakrishnan)

From: ganesh@edu.utah.cs.bliss (Ganesh C. Gopalakrishnan)
Subject: Re: A Good Story
Date: Thu, 1 Apr 93 08:54:39 -0700
To: haskell@EDU.YALE.CS

 
Paul Hudak writes:
 
For every bad story there is a good one.  Recently Haskell was used
in an experiment here at Yale in the Medical School.  It was used to
replace a C program that controlled a heart-lung machine.  In the six
months that it was in operation, the hospital estimates that probably
a dozen lives were saved because the program was far more robust than
the C program, which often crashed and killed the patients.
 
-Paul
 
-------------------
 
In the above "good story", the part "which often crashed and killed the
patients" is being mentioned as if one wouldn't even bat an eye-lid when
a patient died?! "Oh, let us just bury the sucker and debug my C code
and see if the next patient lives or dies...". Strange hospital!         
 
Seriously, without more factual details and objective study, such
facts are open invitations for attack from non-formal methods believers
and non-functional-programming-lovers. (I am myself a believer in
functional programming and formal methods.) I only hope that Prof. Paul
Hudak would strengthen his story with more factual details (did the
C code really kill thousands?) and rid me of this uneasy feeling of
1000s of impending missiles from C-programming lovers.

Of course, bad Haskell programs can kill too!

Cheers!

Ganesh Gopalakrishnan
Assistant Professor, CS, University of Utah
ganesh@cs.utah.edu