> It's a wonder anything actually even works.
> If cars were made like this, there would be millions of them breaking down by the side of the road daily.
Next to the software side of things, I also often wonder about planes. But, until now, they have proved fairly resilient to falling out of the sky, except for the well known "recent" events. Which is fairly surprising, knowing the levels of mismanagement at play. We've been lucky..
Planes have just as much spaghetti code as anything else, the only difference is that it's extremely well tested (functionally) and verified spaghetti code.
It's not hard to imagine there would be even more than in less verified fields, since if you try to clean it up you need to verify it again too.
From talking to someone in the industry TDD seems to be a popular methodology.
Funny anecdote - I was flying through Minneapolis and the passengers on a plane about to depart had to get back off the plane so it could be rebooted. It takes 20 minutes to power down to zero and 20 minutes to boot back up. The gate agent said it was a known touchy computer on that plane - I was wondering if that was true.