OTOH, I would actually say that things have improved of late.
Just in the last couple of decades we've seen what I think are the first serious approaches to error handling. Think about things like the Abrahams Guarantees, or all those fun category-theoretic analyses that the functional folks keep generating.
And then the stakes have gotten higher. Thirty years ago, if a user gave a program messed-up data, then we could shake our heads and say, "Stupid user." Today, large companies put mission-critical functionality on the web, opening it up to people with both the time and the inclination to generate messed-up data in an attempt to bring the system down.
The result of all this is that, just in the last one or two decades, we've finally seen a significant number of large software packages that actually work.
OTOH, I would actually say that things have improved of late.
Just in the last couple of decades we've seen what I think are the first serious approaches to error handling. Think about things like the Abrahams Guarantees, or all those fun category-theoretic analyses that the functional folks keep generating.
And then the stakes have gotten higher. Thirty years ago, if a user gave a program messed-up data, then we could shake our heads and say, "Stupid user." Today, large companies put mission-critical functionality on the web, opening it up to people with both the time and the inclination to generate messed-up data in an attempt to bring the system down.
The result of all this is that, just in the last one or two decades, we've finally seen a significant number of large software packages that actually work.
And that, IMHO, is not a trivial development.