> I hope you succeed, and I say that sincerely

Cheers! Me too. (^_^)

Brother, I really don't want to have this argument again. I don't care anymore if my peers believe me or not. I'm just going to bring it to market as best I can and see how it goes. Thank you for the well-wishing, and I apologize again for being so cranky.

A few lil points:

> I'm not aware of any support for your statement that "error-free software development methods have been available for decades" for any reasonable definitions of "error-free" or "available".

I know. You are making my point: The methods are there, and no one has ever even heard of them.

The primary method I am talking about was developed by Margaret Hamilton during the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon, and she has unsuccessfully marketed ever since AFAIK. Dijkstra once reviewed it and panned it harshly. It was a rare case of him not getting it. It went right over his head.

Hamilton, by the way, is the person who first coined the term "Software Engineering".

I'm not going to go into it further now, suffice it to say if you are typing text into a text editor to write code you are doing it wrong. There's a book, "System Design from Provably-Correct Constructs" by James Martin, that presents Hamilton's method if you're interested.

> The whole point of the original article is that, today, the only thing keeping planes in the air is fault tolerance and lots of redundancy (see also: Erlang). Assertions are about humility and it's good to be humble.

Planes stay in the air because they are designed to survive the failure of the individual parts. Now I would never suggest that proven-correct software cannot fail. Of course it can. Need I invoke the Cosmic Rays? I heed Murphy.

But you only write an assertion if you're not certain, eh? You're saying, in code, I think this will never ever happen, so if it does STOP-THE-LINE.

That kind of uncertainty is absurd, inexcusable, in software. (One of the very few realms that this is true, Herr Gödel notwithstanding. Software is electrified math, math is the "Art of What is Certain".)

I'm saying that our current common methods of software development are pathetic, that we are working far too hard to write software with far too many bugs, and it doesn't have to be this way. I'm further saying (to the OP) not to waste breath arguing with folks who can't or won't even accept the possibility! I've been doing it for a few years now and it's thankless. I've managed to convince exactly one other person and he's a brilliant programmer who came to it from a background in philosophy. He's a thinker rather than a puzzle-addict or complexity junkie.

Anyhow, if I manage to bring this thing together I'll make a noise here on HN (despite YC getting into bed with the Chinese Communists, the greedy fools.)

> On one hand you seem to suggest that error handling is bad because there shouldn't be errors (what about I/O? user error?) while on the other hand you seem to be defending the position that monadic error handling is a panacea.

Nope. Nothing like that. I can't explain it all her and now, but uh... Have you heard of Elm-lang? They boast zero front-end errors. Zero. The Elm compiler makes the JavaScript and it does not error. They do not write "error handling" to achieve this.