I am trying to find a way to reconcile two realities. On one hand, whenever I encounter books or articles on language legalese (particularly in C and C++), it i

I am trying to find a way to reconcile two realities. On one hand, whenever I encounter books or articles on language legalese (particularly in C and C++), it is always immediately apparent that I'm somewhat out of my depth, despite programming in C and C++ for 20 years. I can follow the reasoning, but I almost never spot the finer problems myself. On the other hand, I can and have written large, complex games that run well and appear to be just fine from the user's point of view. I can seemingly write reams of code without ever thinking of such issues, except when they trip up the compiler or cause detectable bugs. I find I very, very seldom need to think of the lawyerly issues at work, or in personal projects, and to my knowledge, nobody has suffered materially for it. (Granted, I am writing games and not NASA software.) Whenever these types of issues come up, I always think: "Wow, I know less than I thought. This seems serious?" And yet I never seem to see real-world consequences. This seems strange to me.