Hacker News Reader

That's a bit like saying "Why buy car insurance? Just learn to not get in accidents" or "Why learn high level languages? Just learn to write assembly code that doesn't suck".

Let me share a secret with you: developers are human beings. They make stupid mistakes.

View on HN

car insurance doesn't automagically make you accident-proof.

driving defensively is a better approach -- you probably will never need insurance. that's why insurance companies give discounts to those who took defensive-driving course.

Here's an idea: take defensive driving and get insurance. Or to make this applicable to the subject at hand, write unit tests and write maintainable code. It's surprising how much doing both increases the effectiveness of either.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com