>> If you need rubber padding on the world to protect you, you might
>> be in the wrong line of work.

> So you really don't believe in the merits of tight type checking and
syntax
> with a better chance of human errors being illegal?

You have referred to high level GUI interactions when keyboard interface
would be superior as "clickety click".
[The trend to compulsion is ongoing - long time "power" users of Microsoft
products will notice that keyboard shortcuts tend to
vanish when 'applications' are 'upgraded'.]
I refer to people compelling me to conform to their controls and
"protections" on my activities (usually but not necessarily in a software
context) as "cottonwool".

The two concepts have some commonality. By all means offer tight type
checking, seat belts, air bags, crash helmets, anti-lock brakes, cruise
control, traction control, fly by wire decoupling of airframe pecidillos*,
control action inversion correction** and much more. BUT, in most cases,
please do not make such helpful interventions compulsory. People who write
software packages that utterly compel one/me to do something for my owen
good/ their sense of correctness/PC stupidity/other ... are not welcome. By
all means offer warnings, optional protections and more, but compulsion
based on somebody else's judgement indicates that they consider that their
juedgement and abilities are superior to mine. They may well be correct :-)
- but I want to be able to hold a variant position. I strongly suspect that
you do too.


    Russell

* Several airbus loses are attributed to such - rightly or wrongly.
** Makes the STS / Space Shuttle semi-manually flyable at high speeds. Few
if any complain about this feature.
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