> Imagine if a sword were made safety as first-class concern. This seems like a silly example. A weapon, meant to dismember and maim attackers of its owner, is

> Imagine if a sword were made safety as first-class concern. This seems like a silly example. A weapon, meant to dismember and maim attackers of its owner, is one of those things that's impossible to completely make safe. Granted I could think of plenty of ideas that maybe would make it safer at first that wouldn't compromise its ability to be effective as a weapon but it's simply not an apt example to be used here. A computer is a general purpose device. It can be used to help image cancer, launch a nuclear weapon or play games. Considering that it's meant to be used by everyone, without discrimination, it seems to make sense that you need to do the best you can to protect the user from themselves. I worked in Apple Care support for about a year. The majority of your users are not going to know all of the consequences to their actions, even ones doing system administration (because let's face it almost every company in the world needs at least a little of that now and not all of them are going to hire someone who knows what they're ding). You can't protect a user from everything. But when you can protect a user from doing something that would have screwed up their whole system, lost a project, etc? That's helpful. Correcting input is what computers are essentially there for.