I think the important question here is whether Linux filesystems are more or less hazardous than statistical mechanics.
(For anyone not familiar with the text, Goodstein's treatment of the subject opens with "Ludwig Boltzman, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.")
The question is if developing filesystems attracts a certain kind of people or the act of debugging filesystem issues & being flamed on the kernel mailing list makes people that way.
My worst technology experience of all time was maintaining support for a Zebra label printer in VB6. I can assure you that the users of these printers had maybe 1% the cortisol response I did when something went wrong.
Designing software for a printer means being a very aggressive user of a printer. There's no way to unit test this stuff. You just have to print the damn thing and then inspect the physical artifact.
A million years ago I worked on some code which needed to interface with a DICOM radiology printer (the kind that prints on transparency film). Each time I had to test it I felt like I was burning money.
perhaps the suffering of the printer devs is karmically 'paid back' by the physical suffering of printers around the globe, thus keeping everything in balance.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
something i have always observed, is how considerate Ted Tso's writing always is, but more than that, how consistent this property has been for so many decades.
its quite funny to me that ext4 very much mirrors him in that regard. its underpinning damn well everything, but you'd never know about it because it works so well.
