We need all the help from our programming languages (and tools) that we can get. Donald Knuth is a remarkable programmer and computer scientist. Interestingly, he kept a list of all the errors in his program TeX[1], which starts in March of 1978.
TeX is an exceptionally stable program, the design has been frozen since version 3.0 in 1990 reflecting Knuth's desire to have a format suitable for reproducing the typesetting precisely even for archived texts that were developed on hardware that is no longer running. Since 1990 only minor changes have been made to TeX and this is reflected in the current version number, 3.14159265, which is converging to pi.
A comment by Knuth in the error log in March of 1990 was "We’re now up to Version 3.0; I sincerely hope all bugs have been found." At that point there had been 908 errors logged. The last entry is currently an entry made in 2014 for error 947.
I've always been fascinated by this list (see [1]).
That is a great list, and the paper that accompanies it is a must-read. Note that to make sense of the list (to put it in context, and what all the abbreviations stand for, etc), it is best to read the paper by Knuth. That's "The Errors of TeX", also reprinted in Literate Programming. (The DOI of the paper is 10.1002/spe.4380190702 and that may help one find and read it.) Just the abbreviations are also given in https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb10-4/tb26knut.pdf but the paper is much more.
TeX is an exceptionally stable program, the design has been frozen since version 3.0 in 1990 reflecting Knuth's desire to have a format suitable for reproducing the typesetting precisely even for archived texts that were developed on hardware that is no longer running. Since 1990 only minor changes have been made to TeX and this is reflected in the current version number, 3.14159265, which is converging to pi.
A comment by Knuth in the error log in March of 1990 was "We’re now up to Version 3.0; I sincerely hope all bugs have been found." At that point there had been 908 errors logged. The last entry is currently an entry made in 2014 for error 947.
I've always been fascinated by this list (see [1]).
[1] http://texdoc.net/texmf-dist/doc/generic/knuth/errata/errorl...