You point out that real world comparison is pointless, fail to elucidate why, and then go and make some of your own comparisons with the space shuttle program...
Ok. The possible combinations of the way your application can (theoretically) run far outnumbers the estimated number of atoms in the visible universe - even for small programs. You just need a couple of loops in loops. If your program don't have it then I'm sure Node, Apache, Postgres, Rails whatever have plenty.
While many of these combinations may never happen you would still have to provide proof of all of them not causing your program to go into a state which you can not handle.
"and then go and make some of your own comparisons with the space shuttle"
This was a comparison of complexity - not a direct comparison between the two.
The possible combinations of the way your application can (theoretically) run far outnumbers the estimated number of atoms in the visible universe - even for small programs. You just need a couple of loops in loops.
Can you elaborate on this? I'm not convinced that this is true (but am willing to be proven wrong)
I ment the whole stack...not just a single fizzbuzz snippet.
As I see it this is what is going on when your users use a webapp.
The user runs some client code which you wrote. In a browser which other guys wrote. Running on an OS made by some one. Sending data back and forth via protocols and network equipment with software that other people wrote.
You server OS receives the request and passes it to your load balancer which distributes to Apache which forwards to PHP which routes to SQL...and all the way back.
With the millions and billions of lines of code involved in these steps it could likely be a number of this magnitude.
