Agreed. I recently read Fernando Corbato's Turing Award speech, "On Building Systems That Will Fail" [0] Corbato drove development of Multics and its predecesso

Agreed. I recently read Fernando Corbato's Turing Award speech, "On Building Systems That Will Fail" [0] Corbato drove development of Multics and its predecessor, CTSS, laying the foundation for much of current operating systems practice. He states his main thesis as 'the question to ask when designing such systems is not: "if something will go wrong, but when will it?"' I do not think he asks this in a defeatist sense (look at what he built!), but in a realist sense. He claims that, for a sufficiently complicated system built on new ideas, that neither rigor in design nor thoroughness in testing is sufficient to account for all of the unintended consequences of the system's design. Without considering the negative consequences of new designs, one is apt to learn them by hard experience. [0] http://larch-www.lcs.mit.edu:8001/~corbato/turing91/ http://larch-www.lcs.mit.edu:8001/~corbato/turing91/