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So, I woodwork, and to keep the fear of merciless spinning metal teeth in me, I frequently watch woodworking safety videos. It's humbling listening to these woodworkers with 30 years experience talk about the time they accidentally fed their thumb through the tablesaw, or the heel of their hand through the jointer, or the tip of their pinky through the router.
99% of the stories start the same way. "I just had to make one more cut." They were in a rush, they were tired, they'd ticked off nearly every item on their todo list for the long day, and suddenly they realize they need one more piece rip cut. There is a safe way to do it, but they are so tired, and so exhausted, and they've done this so many times, they do it the unsafe way figuring it won't be a problem.
It turns out to be a big fucking problem.
Now woodworking is a physical as well as a mental task. There will be physical signs to your exhaustion and wavering judgement. If it's a hobby, you can just decide it's time to hang it up that day. If it's not, I guess that's why people lose thumbs.
A lot of these bugs in Rust code that keep going viral are stupid. But they also stink of a programmer utterly and thoroughly tapped out fighting the borrow checker. So mentally exhausted at the endless walls put up between the simple task they have to do that they've been working through one by one, that at the end of 8 hours their judgement is so impaired they decide "Fuck it, it's just one line of code, it doesn't need to be safe."
I do wonder if we'll start to see more and more problems with Rust code. Not problems caused by negligence, but problems caused by sheer exhaustion. Negligence can be fixed. Exhaustion I'm less certain about.
This reminds me of the last time I worked in a rural setting as a junior. A nurse nonchalantly alerted me to a patient who she described as having had a laceration with some circular saw, with a demeanour suggesting that she thought the patient was a bit of a sissy and should've been told off and sent home.
I took a look at the wound and immediately blanched -- this man's second and third digits of his dominant hand was so obviously degloved that I can't imagine how the nurse could've seen the wound and called it a laceration, the subcutaneous tissue on both fingers was really trying its best to invent a new form of codex.
The only explanation I could think of how she could've given me that handover was that she didn't look at the wound at all and decided to short-cut the decision-making process after hearing a one-sentence summary of the history from the patient's wife.
I don't really have anything to say about the programming side of things, just wanted to share a story that also incidentally includes a woodworking incident and someone trying to take the easy way out.
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This isn't the way safety people think. They think the problem is not that people are tired of fighting their burdensome safety measures and so bypass them; they think the problem is that it's possible to bypass their safety measures, and so see this as reason to put in more controls.
That's not my objection to Rust -- Rust was created by and is controlled by my Culture War enemies, who inject their beliefs into their actions a lot more than even Richard Stallman ever did. But it is an objection to Rust.
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Sounds almost like you're advocating SafeStart: Coding Edition.
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