[lmm]

> Is there some reason to believe that with enough money software could be bug-free?

Yes. It's pretty easy to write provably correct software, just expensive.

> Developers are often guilty of just refactoring for no particularly good reason other than their personal sense of aesthetic, which can lead to endless (and destructive) refactoring

Not my experience, but even if so, if you require your software to be proven correct then it won't matter - any refactor that breaks it simply won't be accepted.

> More money also makes people design lazy, so that instead of finding clever ways to reduce effort and improve uniformity, you just have everyone make their own forms.

Um what? What does this have to do with anything?

[majewsky]

Once you have provably correct software, the much harder problem is provably correct hardware. :)

[hyc_symas]

Good point. But choose the wrong hardware and you can never have provably correct software. E.g., the Intel x86 ISA makes all x86 processors impossible to prove correct. (there are 2^120 possible instruction encodings - the universe will die heat death before anyone could verify all of them in an implementation http://www.emulators.com/docs/nx06_rmw.htm )

[lmm]

Shrug. We have provably validated diodes AIUI. If you can get provably correct basic components you can build up complex components using the same techniques as in software.