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Constraints and Guarantees
I love having guarantees, things that I know are true about the code or system that I’m working with. They make me more productive, less anxious about making a…
If you start looking for it, you will find that the presence of a feature tends to lead people to try to regain some of the guarantees it retracted, through new software, processes, tools or even businesses. People then invent semaphores and mutexes, or they add analysis tools to figure out whether it’s safe or unsafe to split execution into threads - among other solutions by trying to detect whether there is mutation or not in the relevant code. If there’s a sign on the beach saying “No swimming allowed”, I could throw a guess that there are sharks, or that the currents are surprisingly strong, or that there are fragile and endangered species in the water, and I can respect that.
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