[janalsncm]

This raises the question of whether that extreme paranoia prevents critical errors in code. The fact that so many of the issues still persist suggests it does not.

You can tell people to be careful drivers all you want, but what really saves lives is airbags, crumple zones, and seatbelts.

[iforgotpassword]

Because you can't let a driver crash and have a fatal accident as a lesson. That's what this is about. Make it hard and cumbersome, by having students build something non-trivial. I think another benefit of doing it is the Ikea effect, after you've put some effort into the project and see it come together, you might start caring about it and are motivated to get it to work well. Hopefully then some of that mindset carries over when using high level languages and huge frameworks.

[lelanthran]

> This raises the question of whether that extreme paranoia prevents critical errors in code. The fact that so many of the issues still persist suggests it does not.

> You can tell people to be careful drivers all you want, but what really saves lives is airbags, crumple zones, and seatbelts.

Could just be that the frequency of repeated accidents (and the related injuries) is too low to instill paranoia. The analogy is not the same as with programming in C, where the frequency is "multiple times a day", and not "less than once in a lifetime.

IOW, I feel that

> The fact that so many of the issues still persist suggests it [extreme paranoia] does not.

is inaccurate.