Safety is Freedom

One of the slogans that was brought up in the commentary to my previous blog entry was "freedom vs. safety". Once upon a time I used to believe that: it has certainly been conventional wisdom for years. But a lot of the time, the truth is actually that safety is freedom (eg. a good safety harness and rope give you the freedom to climb a mountain).
When I'm writing a function and declare a parameter to be an Image, I am free to trust that it is an Image. I'm free to trust that no one's array access has smashed my data structure. Examples abound.
December 19, 2005 |