Interesting article in a March issue of Science by Alfred Aho (Columbia University). He points out that “few people appreciate the importance of software–until it breaks!”. He estimates that hundreds of billions of lines of code are running systems in the world (corresponding to trillions of dollars invested). This also corresponds to an estimated 5 million to 50 billion defective lines of code…

While “it is unlikely that humans will ever write software with zero defects”, a major area of study is how to make more reliable software systems.

See:

abstract