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Maybe I read it differently, but it seems to me that GP us more concerned with the institutional bias and the attitude rather than anything relating to legal liability... the programmer is allowed to get away with believing that they are taking responsibility for the security of their code, but never feels any consequences for failure, and thus believes they are doing a good job when they are not.

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That's phrasing it better than my original rushed comment, thanks. This insular environment doesn't tend to incentivise responsible choices in software development or in deployment.

Perhaps liability is one way to address it, but hardly the only way. "Engineer" here in Canada is a protected term and you must belong to the society of professional engineers (P.eng), which carries various legal responsibilities when signing off on work.

Requiring code reviews by a P.eng creates a whole different set of incentives, which would emphasise languages that are more expressive, clearer and easier to audit because the P.eng's time is way more costly than the whining of a software developer that wants to squeak 1% more performance out of his inner loops.

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