The memory safety problem isn't bad coders
I remember when I first added ESLint to our large JavaScript codebase, and then again when I added Flow. I'm a perfectionist when I code, but it was shocking to see some of the things I'd written. Mistakes that I thought were so unlike me, but had been sitting there for months anyway, waiting to blow up.<p>The human brain wasn't designed to handle the complexity of large codebases. There are just too many compounding implications of everything for us to hold them all in mind at once. The very best coders miss things all the time.<p>Instead of seatbelts, I would compare tool assistance to aviation instruments. It's not primarily something that just catches you before a disaster; it's something that helps you make the most effective use of your mental resources. We don't ask pilots to fly commercial airliners without advanced software and dozens of readouts and displays to guide their attention and decision-making in an overwhelming sea of information. We shouldn't expect the same of programmers.