Seibel: As our languages get better, or at least more programmer-friendly, compared to the days of assembly language on punch cards, it seems like it's easier to write correct programs—you get a lot of help from compilers that flag errors for you and so forth. Is it possible to allow the focus on readability to come first, if only slightly ahead, of correctness? After all, as the Haskell folks are fond of saying, “If your Haskell program type checks, it can't go wrong.” Steele: I think that's a terrible pitfall. There are so many ways for a compilable program to have errors in it that you
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