Hmm. If I recall correctly, Therac-25 destroyed the company. It (and incidents like it) led the FDA to gradually be more stringent on scrutinizing software in medical devices. And yet, to the best of my knowledge, even the FDA has not mandated formal verification of the embedded software in medical devices.
And yet, there almost certainly were lawsuits. So maybe you found evidence that perfectly counters my theory. It changed software, but only a little bit. Very little, given the magnitude of what happened.
> And yet, there almost certainly were lawsuits. So maybe you found evidence that perfectly counters my theory. It changed software, but only a little bit.
There seems to have been something akin to an "accident chain", where a large number of things went wrong. Had any one of these things not happened, there might have been much less harm caused, or even no harm at all.
I will admit to being peevish about stuff like this. Some of the failures with Therac-25 were systems failures that had nothing to do with software per se (I'm not counting "software hubris" as a software problem). They were failures of process, problems with hardware interlocks, and even UI bugs that made the software confusing to operators.
I have nothing against formal methods, but they're no substitute for a deep and abiding paranoia.
And yet, there almost certainly were lawsuits. So maybe you found evidence that perfectly counters my theory. It changed software, but only a little bit. Very little, given the magnitude of what happened.