Programming’s Greatest Mistakes
summary
A parade of specific blunders: a VB6 utility called unfuck med files accidentally ships as an exe and embarrasses customers; Y2K remediation costs roughly $500bn after decades of two‑digit years; a Pentium FPU rounding bug forces a $475M chip replacement; a single-bit flag repurposed in high‑frequency trading causes a $4.5B runaway position and a $440M bailout; null origins become the billion‑dollar mistake that spawns endless NREs; metric/imperial unit mixups and copy‑paste between 16/32‑bit systems crash rockets and cost hundreds of millions.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Introduction and y2k
- 23:25Processor and code errors
- 25:32Structural and design flaws
- 29:47Trading algorithm disasters
- 37:24Aerospace software failures
- 43:01Copy-paste and rewrite risks
- 45:46Language quirks and cloud bugs
- 53:13A lucky escape and closing
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