Is there a citable source for "The parable of Mike (Michael Burrows) and the login shell"?
I do not think that this whole discussion about returning to a "known good initial state" has much merit, because computers are Turing machines: they modify their own state and then act upon that state. Which means that unless your boot drive is read-only, nobody can predict what your computer will do on the next reboot. (Unless someone solved The Halting Problem and I missed it.)
But the discussion about assertions and initially fragile software that quickly becomes robust did strike a chord with me, because that's exactly what I have been doing for decades now. (Also, I see other programmers using assertions so rarely, that I feel kind of lonely in this.) I have a long post about assertions (https://blog.michael.gr/2014/09/assertions-and-testing.html) to which I would like to add a paragraph or two about this aspect, and preferably cite Burrows.
I do not think that this whole discussion about returning to a "known good initial state" has much merit, because computers are Turing machines: they modify their own state and then act upon that state. Which means that unless your boot drive is read-only, nobody can predict what your computer will do on the next reboot. (Unless someone solved The Halting Problem and I missed it.)
But the discussion about assertions and initially fragile software that quickly becomes robust did strike a chord with me, because that's exactly what I have been doing for decades now. (Also, I see other programmers using assertions so rarely, that I feel kind of lonely in this.) I have a long post about assertions (https://blog.michael.gr/2014/09/assertions-and-testing.html) to which I would like to add a paragraph or two about this aspect, and preferably cite Burrows.