[jamesg]

It's totally about laziness! But that's what computers are all about -- I could store printed versions of all of my documents in a filing cabinet, and go and manually sort them every time I needed a different ordering, but I'm lazy! I use a database!

I just don't see why laziness should be restricted to users. Developers are lazy too.

You're right that there are only 4 rules (or more or less depending on your formulation), but I don't care. I'd rather take the time to have another martini. Or, y'know, implement features that make my users happy.

And it definitely gets harder when there are more moving parts. You're right that the rules are simple, but the execution of those rules gets more complex as you add more components, more threads, remoting, etc. I never said it was impossible, or up there with Fermat's Last Theorem or anything like that. Just that this is work the computer could be doing for me. I want to be lazy, but Apple won't let me.