alt Hacker NewsThe person they responded to refers specifically to "healthcare, finance, automotive, defense, power plans, aviation, manufacturing", areas where I'd at least hope that we aspire to understand what the code does.
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I worked briefly in heath care and the code is so brittle and so poorly understood that almost everyone is afraid to touch anything and instead it's just layers and layers of stuff trying to patch around existing code.
Also software like SQLite:
" SQLite is built using a DO-178B-inspired process. The testing standards for SQLite are among the highest for commercial software.
SQLite is open-source but it is not open-contribution. All the code in SQLite is written by a small team of experts. The project does not accept "pull requests" or patches from anonymous passers-by on the internet. "
I worked for a reinsurance company and their main pricing tool is a huge brittle excel file full of spaghetti VBS code. And yet, they manage to underwrite billions.
Having worked in software for healthcare, defense and finance I guarantee you we don't