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One Expensive Mistake
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2026
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To be fair, an Ariane 5 rocket failed because of a float being treated as a double, or something similar. I don't remember the details, but what makes it embarrassing is that it was the result of recycling code from Ariane 4.
I don't think recycling code is embarrassing? No-one can be expected to write a new codebase from scratch for every new product or machine. That would be worse than building on top of a solid foundation.
It isn't. Never testing that it's compatible with the new hardware platform is.
Having read up on it quickly, the real issue was with a lack of tests and failure handling, so you're not wrong.
Apparently this code wasn't even necessary to run after liftoff, yet it caused the self-destruct.
Crazy.