Living with the surveillance state

Posted Oct 29, 2013 17:44 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Living with the surveillance state by ms
Parent article: Living with the surveillance state

coupled with the utter lack of interest by 99.99999% (underestimate) of all programmers in proving correctness of their code

Do you imply that not even 100 such programmers exist in a whole world? I kind of understand you point, but you are way too pessimistic. 99.9% or may be 99.99% is probably more realistic estimate.

Living with the surveillance state

Posted Oct 29, 2013 17:54 UTC (Tue) by ms (subscriber, #41272) [Link]

> Do you imply that not even 100 such programmers exist in a whole world? I kind of understand you point, but you are way too pessimistic. 99.9% or may be 99.99% is probably more realistic estimate

I started with more 9s and then stopped and had a think. I suppose 1 in 1e7 is too low though finding how many programmers there are in the world is tricky. 1bn seems too high but 10 million seems too low but I've no idea why I think that. Maybe somewhere around 100million? I'd be surprised if there are 10000 programmers who regularly think about proving properties of their code. Which would give 99.99%. But I am pulling all these numbers out of my posterior, it's true.

Maybe I'm just naturally pessimistic ;)