Responsible programming

Abstract

W ELCOME TO " CERF'S UP! " I am grateful for Editor-in-Chief Moshe Vardi's invitation to continue writing for Communications ; this column succeeds the " From the President " column I penned during my service to ACM in that role. Let me congratulate Alex Wolf, the newly elected ACM president. I know he will give exemplary service to our organization. Congratulations also go to Vicki Hanson and Erik Altman in their new roles as vice president and secretary/ treasurer respectively. I know this team will provide first-rate leadership. I also thank Alain Chenais, who ends his term as Past President and I begin mine. He has been a staunch, reliable, and active leader in ACM matters and I expect this will continue. There are many others elected to new positions or moving on as their terms in office end. I thank them all without enumeration, and commend them to your attention. Lastly, allow me to note the enormous contributions of the ACM staff and, especially , the leadership of John White, CEO, and Pat Ryan, COO of ACM. They have accumulated a truly enviable record of steadfast leadership spanning the terms of many elected ACM officers. Now to the substance of this column: responsible programming. What do I mean by that? In a nutshell, I think it means people who write software should have a clear sense of responsibility for its reliable operation and resistance to compromise and error. We do not seem to know how to write software that has no bugs…at least, not yet. But that, in a sense, is the very subject I want to explore. My very good friend, Steve Crocker, drew me into a conversation about this topic a short while ago. As a graduate student , he had pursued a dissertation on provable correctness of programs. While this is not a new topic, the objective continues to elude us. We have developed related tactics for trying to minimize errors. Model checking is one good example of a systematic effort to improve reliability for which ACM gave the Turing Award in 2007 to Edmund Clarke, Allen Emerson, and Joseph Sifakis. What is apparent, and emphasized by Crocker, is the tools available to programmers for validating assertions about program operation are complex, with user interfaces only a mother could love (my characterization). Formal proofs are difficult, especially for anything but the simplest sort of program. …