This thread on Hacker News terrifies me

[Norm]

On Saturday, 1 September 2018 at 20:48:27 UTC, Walter Bright 
wrote:
> On 9/1/2018 5:25 AM, tide wrote:
>> and that all bugs can be solved with asserts
>
> I never said that, not even close.
>
> But I will maintain that DVD players still hanging on a 
> scratched DVD after 20 years of development means there's some 
> cowboy engineering going on, and an obvious lack of concern 
> about that from the manufacturer.

Firstly, you have to take into account the context around why 
that bug exists and why it is not fixed and it comes does to a 
risk-cost trade off.

Product managers are totally driven by budget and in consumer 
goods they dictate the engineering resources. I think you'll find 
most large DVD manufactures have discovered that it is not cost 
effective to give engineers the budget to fix these annoying 
bugs. This is because most consumers will be annoyed but then go 
out and purchase som other product by the same manufacturer. I.e. 
these bugs do not harm their brand enough.

This leads to the situation where the engineering is shoddy not 
because the programmers are bad engineers, but because they don't 
even get the chance to engineer due to time constraints.

Secondly, DVD players and critical flight systems are apples and 
oranges in terms of engineering rigor required. One will mildly 
annoy the odd consumer, who 9 times of 10 will still purchase 
<Insert Brand Here> products again and the other will likely kill 
100s of people.

To put it another way; one will give the engineers *zero* 
resources to work on non-blocking bugs and the other must have 
*zero* non-blocking bugs.

Cheers,
Norm