> That's just bad engineering. "Seems unlikely, therefore we ignore it" is essentially how you create broken corner cases that result in unreliable systems, i.e

> That's just bad engineering. "Seems unlikely, therefore we ignore it" is essentially how you create broken corner cases that result in unreliable systems, i.e., braindead. I can only assume, then, that your "simple" example wasn't simple at all, but a contrivance to result in such a corner case. You've also confused "we ignore it" with "we consciously decide not to bother with it". > That's not a justification for building bad systems, that's only an explanation for why bad systems survive once they have been built. This is a distinction without a difference. This isn't a moral issue, so "justification" is irrelevant. There are only tradeoffs. Insisting that the design was just bad, broken, unreliable, or braindead, while not even acknowledging the tradeoffs (i.e. ignoring the positives or, instead, calling them negatives) strikes me as disingenuous. > You might as well say that fraud improves survivability. Nope. That's a strawman. > In which case that philosophy was braindead then? I urge you to read the essay and the commentary around "Worse is Better". Otherwise, all this is essentially just a shallow dismissal. You have, in essence, argued in favor of the "MIT method". As I said, this argument was already given, by the original proponents, the mentioned essay's author, and numerous other reasonably well known names in computer science, mostly decades ago. A web search or even just Wikipedia can provide jumping off points.