This is why I laugh at talk of "bug free" software. The best you can do is zero reported bugs. Temporarily.
- George Berkley (apocryphal)
It's fine to handle an explicit subset of a problem. What's not fine is not making this clear. Real software can generally have a well-defined domain and range, which this article muddies with its example.
> This works but is quitter talk.
It's a valid solution. Expressing weird recipes as lists of normal recipes is perfectly fine.
> If we want to include recipe expansion as a feature of our model, we need to make the algorithm more complicated to handle the single edge case of fondant.
Yes, it turns out writing correct software sometimes requires this, even for a small amount of overall cases. That's no argument against not handling all cases.
To the parent poster:
I expect someone incapable of writing perfect software to claim it to be impossible, yes. I'd upload an article I've written proving my point, but it's about correct software, so it would just get ignored here.
Software is mathematics, and mathematics can be perfect.
> This is why I laugh at talk of "bug free" software. The best you can do is zero reported bugs. Temporarily.
No, this is the best the incompetent can do, but I won't let them drag me down to their level.