There are plenty of do-overs, it's called the "development phase" and involves testing things on your local computer with the team.
No one gets everything right the first time, but with a lot of testing, you can actually write software that does exactly what you think it will do, and you can achieve pretty cool stuff. Remember that humans wrote the software that took humanity to the moon!
As we know, no software has had bugs caught once launched to prod. The existence of some software that worked under this model is not evidence that it is a good model. "Just test prior to release" is not a complete solution.
Are you talking about the user from https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/sfz4kw/did_i_just... ? And do you mean "read-only memory"? I'm not sure how that's relevant. The contract they made the transfer to is read-only yes, like any contract on Ethereum. But they could have tested the contract call with a smaller sum before actually performing the bigger one.
Just like the people writing the computer that took us to the moon, I'm pretty sure they tried it before in small-scale simulations before hooking it up to the rocket and letting it go to the moon.
The idea that people need to treat financial transactions in crypto as if they were writing software for a moon mission shows how impractical the entire space is.
If that was the case, I'd agree with you. But as outlined in the comments of this submission time and time again, it was not what happened here.
The user was not doing a normal transfer (at least, they didn't want to, but they ended up doing). They didn't know what they were doing at all, a simply Google search would have showed them the way. Using UIs instead of interacting with the contract directly would have prevented them from making the mistake they did. Doing a small test transfer before doing the big one would have revealed what was wrong as well.
It's not that I'm comparing writing software for moon missions with making cryptocurrency transactions. I was directly replying to mox1 implying that writing 100% correct code is impossible and shouldn't be attempted.
There are 0 do-overs on smart contracts in production. No stopping the network for a minute to triage, no rolling back a minute, no circuit breakers. No "Error 1202, do you want to continue?" pop-up messages.
No one gets everything right the first time, but with a lot of testing, you can actually write software that does exactly what you think it will do, and you can achieve pretty cool stuff. Remember that humans wrote the software that took humanity to the moon!