It's not apples-to-apples, but if you look at the number of lines of code executed before a noticeable bug it's in the trillions.

You could, but the argument would be false there. Building a car, constructing a house, sewing a shirt, writing a book, etc. are all not significantly more complex than they were decades ago. Software is orders of magnitude more complex than decades ago.

You would be incorrect - having worked in the industry for a short while, I can attest that modern automobiles are at least an order of magnitude more complex than something from, say, the 60s.

They still operate on the same mechanical principles, but we exploit these in vastly more complex and efficient ways. If you want to make this argument, then you also have to accept that computers are "just" current running across silicon.

No, the reason why we get away with this is because replacement is easy. You get a car right the first time because a large recall can cost in the hundreds of millions, and be logistically impossible to execute. For us it's a simple "Hey! We has update! Yes/No?" dialog box.

But that's compared to Moore's law that a computer becomes an order of magnitude more complex roughly each eighteen months for twenty or more orders of magnitude increase from the sixties.

Also, modern cars do have lots of bugs in sense of suboptimal behaviors. They just cannot fail utterly without people being pissed.

The complexity of code - not the compiled binary - the text you punch into the machine and what it semantically represents, has not really gotten that much more complicated over the years. We've introduced several new paradigms since the COBOL mainframes: object orientation, functional, to name a couple. It'd be hard to argue, though, that it follows Moore's Law. Not even close.

> They just cannot fail utterly without people being pissed.

This is an important point: people who expect flawless behaviour from software because other fields of engineering demonstrate it, IMHO, are misguided. Aircraft engineers work incredibly slowly because the consequences of fucking up is perhaps thousands of deaths, and billions in liabilities. Car engineers are the same on a lesser scale. There's no need to expect flawless, 100% perfect function when you don't need flawless, 100% perfect function.

We could spend 20 years developing the perfect toaster that will never, ever burn your toast. Or we can spend 2 months on something that will get it right 97% of the time, and just move on with our lives.

Software is different not just because it is more complex, but because computers are much more finicky than roads and people. A logic flaw in software can cost millions; an equivalent flaw in a book will likely never be noticed.