> I take it you've never seen a program written for a cell phone, a 
> set-top box, or an MP3 player?

No.

I have also never seen a program written to control a nuclear reactor. 
I'm guessing that for such a program, machine efficiency is irrelevant 
(if we need a faster PC, we'll just buy one), and program correctness is 
the *only* criteria of any significance. I bet people writing such 
software don't just accept random hangups and crashes as an unavoidable 
fact of life. They fix them. All of them.

Anyway, embedded programming and safety-critical programming are both 
very specialist. I doubt many people will ever see such code in their 
lives. And I guess you could argue that games programming is pretty 
specialist too... "Most" programs, after all, are either desktop 
applications or web applications, and most of them just push data around.

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