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Visual Basic 3?
What we have instead are mysterious black boxes, and I hate that. But, I'm on the end-user support side of things. Here, let me give you some examples of stuff we've dealt with in our little shop in just the last few days:
I don't need examples - I wrote my comment on a phone, and twice it popped up Input system error. The system is being restarted, which, it seems, is a spell-check problem. And that's a system which does me more annoyance than good even when it's working normally.
We have a firewall with a subsystem which crashes when enabled, and the manufacturer says it's a known problem with no estimated fix time, the only option is to disable that feature - one of their main selling points of the device.
A web server, showing problematic memory use and no process using it.
GVim on Windows 7 x64 - I could (not sure if I can remember what it was now) repeatedly make it hang, not just itself but also the entire OS, with an operation on a large file which is instant on Linux. Yet Task manager shows no high CPU or memory or disk use.
Anyway, it's like this for us all the time.
Yes, but it's a fallacy to think I could practically do anything about it if only it wasn't so black box like. Do you really have time and motivation to become expert enough in all the things you deal with that you could fix any problem if only it was more explorable?
You may as well ask a restaurant if you can watch the staff cook all your food over their shoulders so you can intercept and change things if you think it's going in a direction you don't want.
Even if you are able to taste too much sugar in an Apple Pie, it doesn't follow that you could remove the sugar if only you were in the kitchen watching how much was put in (it's dissolved by then), and it doesn't follow that you could tell if too much was put in just by looking - it depends on how sweet the apples are, and whether the sweetness changes with length of baking.
See also: the idea of systemantics.
And what am I going to do when it's your webserver crashing, or your iCloud server, or DropBox, or if it's my car navigation system or my phone's spell checker?
But, I would hope that that alone would motivate programmers to make them crash less.
Programmers don't make software that crashes for fun, you know. If it took no effort, they would make programs which don't crash right now. But it does take effort, and that's a limited resource which needs to be traded off.
