In real life, you never have to stop to consider…

In real life, you never have to stop to consider whether, for example, the failure of gravity to operate as expected is a possible explanation for some problem. In the realm of computers and software, you’re dealing with abstractions layered on abstractions, and in order to make progress on the higher-level ones you have to believe in the lower-level ones. But in order to debug things, you have to question all assumptions, at every level, all the time. This is, psychologically, just plain hard. [Jon’s Radio]