Very well stated. I'm jealous of your ability to articulate your point.
The underlying contradiction seems to be a theme in software development. People who haphazardly slap together inefficient and buggy software assume the safety-critical software I've worked on must be engineered to an impossibly high standard in formally-proven Ada. We don't use Ada or formal proofs, for the same reasons nobody else does. I can say we are a lot more careful than 99+% of other projects, but we still live in the same software ecosystem everyone else does. I can't audit every platform and library we use with a fine tooth comb. A few million dollars will buy you a lot of reviews and testing (internal/external/penetration testing), but it will never be the platonic ideal of well-written software.
And Debian is a funny example for you to bring up. It's hard to take the temperature of a crowd online, but the HN attitude towards Debian's slow-and-careful releases in any other type of thread is that they're old fogies that don't understand the needs of modern software. I don't think even Debian lives up to this thread's level of code scrutiny that everyone should be doing all the time.
The underlying contradiction seems to be a theme in software development. People who haphazardly slap together inefficient and buggy software assume the safety-critical software I've worked on must be engineered to an impossibly high standard in formally-proven Ada. We don't use Ada or formal proofs, for the same reasons nobody else does. I can say we are a lot more careful than 99+% of other projects, but we still live in the same software ecosystem everyone else does. I can't audit every platform and library we use with a fine tooth comb. A few million dollars will buy you a lot of reviews and testing (internal/external/penetration testing), but it will never be the platonic ideal of well-written software.
And Debian is a funny example for you to bring up. It's hard to take the temperature of a crowd online, but the HN attitude towards Debian's slow-and-careful releases in any other type of thread is that they're old fogies that don't understand the needs of modern software. I don't think even Debian lives up to this thread's level of code scrutiny that everyone should be doing all the time.