PEP 3107 and stronger typing (note: probably a newbie question)

[Donn Cave]

In article <878x9llv5x.fsf at benfinney.id.au>,
 Ben Finney <bignose+hates-spam at benfinney.id.au> wrote:

> Paul Rubin <http://phr.cx@NOSPAM.invalid> writes:
> 
> > The idea of designing languages with more and more support for
> > ensuring program correctness is to put the established, repetitive
> > processes into the computer where it belongs, freeing the programmer
> > to be innovative while still providing high assurance of that the
> > program will be right the first time.
> 
> This seems to make the dangerous assumption that the programmer has
> the correct program in mind, and needs only to transfer it correctly
> to the computer.
> 
> I would warrant that anyone who understands exactly how a program
> should work before writing it, and makes no design mistakes before
> coming up with a program that works, is not designing a program of any
> interest.

I don't get it.  Either you think that the above mentioned support
for program correctness locks program development into a frozen
stasis at its original conception, in which case you don't seem to
have read or believed the whole paragraph and haven't been reading
much else in this thread.  Certainly up to you, but you wouldn't be
in a very good position to be drawing weird inferences as above.

Or you see original conception of the program as so inherently
suspect, that random errors introduced during implementation can
reasonably be seen as helpful, which would be an interesting but
unusual point of view.

   Donn Cave, donn at u.washington.edu