Chesterton and Hollnagel’s Safety I/II

I never that knew GK Chesterton, a 19th - 20th century writer, raconteur and master of the bon mot, knew about 21st century industrial and laboratory safety culture. Neither did Chesterton, probably. Types of Safety, Type-Safety, and Good Ol’ GKC So I was reading – as one does – about software safety and the use of the programming language Haskell to make certain kinds of faults impossible [1], what with isolation of side-effects in monads, an expressive (!) but strict type system, lazy evaluation order, and so on. You know: the stuff we all understand, but which software management (and corporate management more generally) just insists on denying? Yeah, that stuff. Duncan’s article began talking about software safety, lamenting that people usually relegate it to unit tests, integration tests, fault logs, and so on. This means you get very, very good at finding out what went wrong, but not so good at understanding and designing for what makes things go right. This is very much au…