Originally Posted by AnQrKa
Welcome to the new world. Is a software glitch any more concerning than a rudder hardover? Or fuel icing flaming out both engines?
AnQrKa, the issue with software vs mechanical is this.
Whilst no watch maker, I'm sure there would be relatively few "classic" watch mechanism designs - a function of the physical nature of the mechanism. Even a new design would be easily understood by an expert watchmaker who had not seen it before, and its design limitations would be relatively easy to imagine.
However, software is infinitely variable,
precisely because it is not limited by the physical - it is only limited by the imagination of its creator. On the one hand this offers an enormous opportunity to free a device from the physical world's constraints. However, there are downsides. Complexity & lack of standardisation. Whilst there are coding principles & techniques, looking over thousand, or hundreds of thousand of lines of code & abstracting that back to a complex working program is not what the human brain does well. A new software engineer looking through code may not pick up a critical, but subtle flaw. Further, unlike a mechanical device that literally has thousands of ground engineers examining a component out on the line, monitoring performance & noticing flaws, software "black box" solutions have a limited number of eyes to examine the code.
It is not obvious that flaws in software can lurk for years or decades prior to discovery.
Developer fixes 33-year-old Unix bug.
This is software's Achilles heel, the promise of infinite variability leads to the consequence of infinite complexity.