But face it, Jim, there really are bozos in life, so deal with it. McCarthy explains what the bozo bit costs when it is flipped. This is important because for many people, it is very hard to clear the bozo bit once it is flipped. If I believed that, I would not spend my waking hours writing code. The only time that software sucks is when it causes users to lose work.
Most programmers write code that does what they intend, and that is good.
Still, I agree with most of McCarthy's book. He relays much that is not obvious, yet fundamental and true. Dynamics of Software Development is easy to read, provides valuable insight to the software-development process, and is especially important to people who haven't had the pleasure of being on a software team. It copes well with representing text in most European languages, so it satisfies the needs of most information transfers. My first reaction when thumbing through The Unicode Standard, Version 2.0 was culture shock.