I think part of this is the limitations of interest that come from a film. You can write a whole movie about an electrical engineer building robots and visually show the struggles along the way. If you compare that to a software engineer searching for another fucking memory leak or something then it's just not going to be as visually interesting.
An interesting thing about this is that I think it's easier to show in print. I can read a book about a maverick developer and have it describe the errors and the trials and tribulations and it isn't as slow by comparison. Hollywood then feels the need to emphasize what they show with wild CGI, which is a whole other issue when it comes to entertaining portrayals. I think the only realistic portrayal I've seen onscreen is Mr. Robot, and even that goes into fiction when it's most needed for the plot.
Valgeind and vim are both pretty neat looking IMO. Showing the real tools occasionally is something I’ve enjoyed seeing in some recent Sci-Fi movies. Tron Legacy and Chappie are both examples and even though the end result was unrealistic I thought they did a neat job showing the engineer working for years tediously on the project.
Tron did do a decent job, it was cool to see that. At least having a basis in reality goes a long way to making the the 'fi' part believable, if only for those that recognize the basis in current or previous technology.
An interesting thing about this is that I think it's easier to show in print. I can read a book about a maverick developer and have it describe the errors and the trials and tribulations and it isn't as slow by comparison. Hollywood then feels the need to emphasize what they show with wild CGI, which is a whole other issue when it comes to entertaining portrayals. I think the only realistic portrayal I've seen onscreen is Mr. Robot, and even that goes into fiction when it's most needed for the plot.