The quote was about "programming by poking" which I take as highly relevant to actual distributed software. It meant (1) systems are more built by integrating m

The quote was about "programming by poking" which I take as highly relevant to actual distributed software. It meant (1) systems are more built by integrating many components, and (2) for many reasons, the components are not understood by the integrator and (3) they must resort to experimentation to validate how things actually work. Unless you have a TLA+ model of all your components and how they interact, I would argue you don't understand your distributed system either, for all inputs. https://web.archive.org/web/20160505011527/http://www.posteriorscience.net/?p=206 https://web.archive.org/web/20160505011527/http://www.poster...