Right? Never mind that thoughtfulness of design is a requirement to understanding complex distributed systems. And before we go off saying that few developers

Right? Never mind that thoughtfulness of design is a requirement to understanding complex distributed systems. And before we go off saying that few developers need to know how to program distributed systems consider that even a modern processor is a tiny distributed system. This idea that genius will spout forth from the hands of the programmer in the spur of the moment is hogwash. If you believe this then let's make a wager. We'll pick a simple, standard algorithm. I'll give you the requirements, you implement it. I'll model your solution and run it in a model checker. I bet you that the checker will find an error in your implementation. Simple, right? A colleague of mine did this to his students. They had to implement binary search. The majority of their solutions had bugs. These weren't under-grads. Programming is hard because thinking is hard and we deserve the best tools we can find to help us think clearly and precisely. In the real-world we can always just add a fudge-factor to make up for our uncertainty while computers are infuriatingly discrete systems. This flow of "thinking in code," is simple-minded ignorance. Think in code all you want. You won't be able to solve the hard problems that way. You'll just write sloppy code. ... </rant>