If you are interested, I highly recommend the youtube channel Kings and Generals. It has very good history content on the last centuries of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Ottomans, among others.
Right, if you consider the internal state, it is hardly similar. You talked about black box and QA though. Black box by definition holds the internal state as irrelevant, and QA mostly treats the software it tests as a black box, or in other words the tests are "superficial" as you call it.
Your run of the mill computer program also "operates in enormous parameter spaces that are impossible to meaningfully test for all possible adversarial inputs and degraded outputs".
> Game of Thrones completely disregards the real world, and because this is on purpose, I think criticisms from "realism" are unwarranted
This is not true, any work of fiction needs to be believable within the bounds it sets for its world. Those bounds are extended to include dragons and magic, but no more. The rest of it should be as close to the real world as possible. There's a term for this, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verisimilitude_(fiction)
Would you say that a database is a "black box full of binary garbage, chewing gum and rubber bands that tightly couples everything in Windows.and it's like spaghetti and can't possibly be unwound"?
I don't think you would, that's not the conventional wisdom. Databases are considered to be the epitomy of clean, reliable, and efficient representations of data. It is text files that lack these capabilities and are considered a non-standard mess when it comes to data.
The registry is just a database. It may have not seen the best usage it could have from windows and applications, does that make it a bad architectural decision? Would we think different on the registry if it was just SQLite (or would we in this case think differently of SQLite)? Personally I firmly believe that the registry approach is a great architectural decision, for all the reasons outlined here: https://sqlite.org/appfileformat.html
I share the sentiment, but not for Roblox. Hashicorp, with a recent IPO, 200 mil operating revenue, and supposedly a good engineering reputation has one of its flagship products critically depend on a "toy project".
You are basing the statement "fear of wolves is completely irrational" on your experience as an outdoorsperson and 25 years of yellowstone. This is not a good basis. Wolves had lived in huge populations and had been in conflict with humans for thousands of years, with human casualties. Humans were very much afraid of wolves, and rightly so. Physically weak and isolated humans such as children and elderly are prime targets of wolf attacks.
He bribed people for sure. Microsoft products had completely overtaken the public sector IT of several countries back in the 90s/00s. To get into the public sector of several third-world and not so third-world countries, bribing is more or less mandatory, business as usual. We've seen scandals like these dozens of times with all kinds of big companies. Bribing to get big public infrastructure projects from companies like Siemens, bribing to get pharma machinery into public hospitals. No such scandal was ever published for Microsoft that I know of, but this is how things work.
There's a whole discipline around converting diagrams to code, called Model Driven Engineering. The idea is that you capture business entities and rules in various well defined diagrams, which then can be converted to code through code generation tools, i.e. can be turned into programs.
This was mainly promoted and developed by the creators of UML and has strong ties to it. That was UML's vision after all, a visual diagram language that unambiguously captures the essense of a program.
The Eclipse Modeling Framework is a framework that implements this approach.
I think MDE was up and coming around the end of the 2000s. As far as I know it didn't really go anywhere.