But there do exist shelves that don’t warp, when used within some reasonable bounds.

I’d also quibble about the buttons on the coffee machine. They might be properly designed, just subject to the normal wear-and-tear that is inevitable in the real world. This is not a defect, physical devices have finite lifespans.

As far as computers go… if we got to the point where the main thing that killed our programs was the hard drives falling apart and capacitors drying out, that would be quite impressive and I think everyone would be a little bit less critical of the field.

Formally verified, bug free software exists. It just costs a LOT to produce, and typically isn't worth it, except for things like cryptographic libraries and life or death systems.

As the discipline has evolved, the high integrity tools are slowly being incorporated into typical languages and IDEs to generally improve quality cheaper. Compare C++ to rust for example, whole classes of bugs are impossible (or much harder to make) in rust.

A shelve is a dumb primitive static object though. Even a simple hello world goes over a huge amount of lines of code before it is displayed on a screen, ANY one of which being faulty could result in a bug visible to the enduser. And most of that is not even controlled by the programmer — they might call into libc, which calls into the OS, which calls into drawing/font rendering libraries, that calls into video card drivers that “calls” into the screen’s firmware.

And this is almost the simplest possible program.

I think “hello world” is not really the simplest program in this context, in the sense that printing, as you note, involves touching all that complicated OS stuff. In terms of, like, actual logic complexity implemented by the programmer compared to mess carried along by the stack, it is really bad.

But I mean, I basically agree that the ecosystem is too complicated.

There are many examples of catastrophic bugs in real life.

New bridges collapses, dams overflow s, planes crashes, vaccines kills, food kills, leaning towers and skyscrapers, capsized ships - catastrophic flaws are everywhere.