Without factoring in the cost of errors and the cost of avoiding the errors, this debate is a pointless exercise in transcribing (i) dogma, (ii) favorite hypothetical situations and (iii) favorite anecdotal evidence. I doubt any original thought will come out of it today.
I feel like this is just the scientist/engineer debate, where the former is trying to discover objective truth, and the other just wants to build stuff.
It's an elemental disagreement, where the scientist is saying "You don't know everything!" and the engineer is replying "So what?"
But yeah, probably we're not going to learn anything with it.
I doubt it is a engineer / scientist thing. Dijkstra was way much more of an engineer-programmer than many would realize. He was an engineer first and the rest later.
I think it is about correctness of claims. There are engineers who are cognizant of the deficiencies of testing, and those that believe that testing is truly sufficient and complete.
