> I think that, in general, most programmers struggle to accept that correctness can sometimes be traded-off—personally, it offends a deep internal conviction o

> I think that, in general, most programmers struggle to accept that correctness can sometimes be traded-off—personally, it offends a deep internal conviction of mine that programs should be correct. [...] possible incorrectness more often causes problems. I might be happy trading off a bit of image-quality for better compression, but if an ML system rewrites my code and leaves off a "not" I'm unhappy. I'm torn on this point. On the one hand, I'm as fallible as any human, and reading this has made me aware of a bias I've always had but never realised was there. But on the other hand, our field is young, and there are surely better, correct solutions to be found for things like compression and sorting. So with that assumption, I find it tempting to label programmers who trade correctness for speed or size (e.g. using JPEG when QOI and WebP exist) as 'lazy', since "they haven't exhausted all other options". Obviously that's not fair—it ignores practicality and trivialises the discovery of novel algorithms—but I feel there's still some truth in it.