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I think this is accurate, and not at all pedantic. The idea that software has 'gettiers' seems accurate and meaningful. To some degree, making and maintaining
by Bartweiss 8y ago
I think this is accurate, and not at all pedantic.
The idea that software has 'gettiers' seems accurate and meaningful. To some degree, making and maintaining gettiers is in fact the point of black-boxing. Something like a well-implemented connection pool is designed to let you reason and code as though the proxy didn't exist. If you form beliefs around the underlying system you'll lack knowledge, but your beliefs will be justified and ideally also true.
(One might argue that if you know about the layer of abstraction your belief is no longer justified. I'd argue that it's instead justified by knowing someone tried to replicate the existing behavior - but one form of expertise is noticing when justified beliefs like that have ceased to be true.)
And yet this story isn't about facades breaking down, it's just a common debugging error. Perhaps the precise statement the author quotes is a true and justified, but the logic employed isn't. And it's an important difference: being aware of environment changes you didn't make is a useful programming skill, while being aware of broken abstractions and other gettier problems is a separate useful skill.