> If there was a physical "undo" button, I could get behind this philosophy
I had two reactions to this -
The first is that's part of why I like working on low-stakes physical projects - especially when I'm working in my garden, I'm almost aggressively improvisational, just trying to use whatever's on hand to do the job and fixing things as I go. Because the garden is mine and just an absolute hobby, I get to play around, and the feeling of satisfaction I get from cobbling something together to solve a problem easily matches delivering a carefully-done plan.
The second is that undo button makes us sloppy. I noticed this the first time I went into management - the hardest part of the job was I had no idea if I'd done something right and no way to do it again if I didn't. It's made me sloppy a few other places as well, where I've found myself staring at something and thinking "well shit, there's no undo here, is there?" I think spending some time with some things that have stakes and can't be undone is healthy, and I think programming somehow makes us both sloppier and more risk-averse by its almost unbounded undo-ability.
Parenting was where I learned how to live with the lack of an undo. One gets used to it, but I find cyberspace much easier: I can try 1000 things in a few days and come out with a solution that seemed maybe impossible up front. Although one does get many chances to hone the interactions with kids, mistakes are not zero cost :) and once the parent and kid really master something, the kid grows a bit and the old solution reaches the end of its validity.
I would emphasize both that the undo-ability is very freeing and that the compiler/tests guardrails let one focus on the novel part rather than the routine part.
I had two reactions to this -
The first is that's part of why I like working on low-stakes physical projects - especially when I'm working in my garden, I'm almost aggressively improvisational, just trying to use whatever's on hand to do the job and fixing things as I go. Because the garden is mine and just an absolute hobby, I get to play around, and the feeling of satisfaction I get from cobbling something together to solve a problem easily matches delivering a carefully-done plan.
The second is that undo button makes us sloppy. I noticed this the first time I went into management - the hardest part of the job was I had no idea if I'd done something right and no way to do it again if I didn't. It's made me sloppy a few other places as well, where I've found myself staring at something and thinking "well shit, there's no undo here, is there?" I think spending some time with some things that have stakes and can't be undone is healthy, and I think programming somehow makes us both sloppier and more risk-averse by its almost unbounded undo-ability.