| I'd argue the reverse: that in software, very small errors can have vast consequences, but it's virtually impossible in many cases to tell what those consequences may be or where they'll fall. The reason is that software systems are at another level of complexity. The Space Shuttle is often given as an example of the most complex machine every built, with more than 2.5 million parts. The Airbus A380 has about 4 million parts. https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-most-complex-machine-ever-bu... The Linux Kernel, not necessarily the most complex software ever written, has nearly 10 million lines of executable code, over 12 million with comments, scattered over 36,000+ files. https://www.quora.com/How-many-lines-of-code-are-in-the-Linu... Google's back-end cluster and services are frequently given as the most complex software existing. The full LoC in Debian GNU/Linux has been estimated as 324 million as of 2009. This is the stable archive, which includes somewhere between about 30k to 70k individual software packages (I'd have to do some digging to see what the count was for the stable release as of 2009). https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/111281/exploding-am... |