Sometimes I am boiling a stew, and while I am preparing another dish on the side, for some unknown reason I put the raw eggs on the stew instead of the fry pan.
Pans have been there for centuries, and there is nothing preventing me from throwing stuff in the wrong place, nor undo the eggs in the stew. It's so intolerable, and I feel so ashamed and guilty on behalf of all the pan makers.
Not. We are in a field where we can prevent a lot more stuff to happen than in the real world (and the real world is soooo broken...). We should try our best to make the state of usability and fool-proofness advance as much as we can, and surely there must already be something that would help your wife's case. But we should also be more realistic when voicing expectations.
No, no, no. This is why reasoning by analogy can lead you astray. We have enough control over the world of software that the problem described above should not exist. This control does not exist in the real world, but it does in software.
Do we have enough control over software to make it impossible for someone to delete something and make it unrecoverable when they will later realize they should not have done so?
Not impossible, no. But we absolutely have enough control over software to make it highly improbable for someone to accidentally delete something important and make it unrecoverable.
His problem (or his wife's) is solvable, even right now. She could use time machine, dropbox works as well, using a versionning system would also work, she could switch to an editor that supports infinte undos, dozens of other solutions exist.
But all these require preparation, settings and some care. It could get better, even 'magical', but it would be an achievement that should not be taken for granted.
Btw we could make a pan for stew that checks if you are adding eggs to it, but no one would want the tradeoffs IMO.
Pans have been there for centuries, and there is nothing preventing me from throwing stuff in the wrong place, nor undo the eggs in the stew. It's so intolerable, and I feel so ashamed and guilty on behalf of all the pan makers.
Not. We are in a field where we can prevent a lot more stuff to happen than in the real world (and the real world is soooo broken...). We should try our best to make the state of usability and fool-proofness advance as much as we can, and surely there must already be something that would help your wife's case. But we should also be more realistic when voicing expectations.