The Wrong Stuff

[Walter Bright]

http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/thewrongstuff/archive/2010/06/28/risky-business-james-bagian-nasa-astronaut-turned-patient-safety-expert-on-being-wrong.aspx


tl;dr: "Telling people to be careful is not effective. Humans are not reliable 
that way. ... You need a solution that's not about making people perfect."


This article doesn't say anything about software, but I think it is very 
applicable to programming and the design of programming languages. I often hear 
that a fault isn't a fault because we can "educate" programmers to avoid the 
problem. This article puts the kibosh on that. Errors that we can eliminate by 
changing the design of the language, we should so eliminate (unless their costs 
make the language unuseable, obviously).