Sun Software Engineer Bryan Cantrill on Software Perfection

Technology Review’s editors chose Bryan Cantrill to be one of the 2005 TR35, our annual selection of top technology innovators under the age of 35. As a senior staff engineer at Sun Microsystems, he created DTrace, an application that allows system administrators and software engineers to track down bugs in real time. Cantrill recently told us that he absolutely believes software can be perfected–but that humans can never design it that way from the start. So how do we get from here to there?