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by userbinator 699 days ago
I think all programmers should have the experience of using and developing on a single-address-space OS with absolutely no protections like DOS, just to encourage them to improve their skills at writing better, actually correct code. When the smallest bugs will crash your system and cause you to lose work, you tend to be a lot more careful with thinking about what your code does instead of just running it to see what happens.
1 comments

Suggesting “Being more careful” never solves these issues because eventually someone somewhere will have a momentary slip up that causes this.

The real takeaway is that we need to design systems so this kind of issue is less possible. Put less code in the kernel, use tools that prevent these kinds of issues, design computers that can roll back the system if they crash.