"[T]eaching programmers to think in flow-charts stymied the approach that avoids semantic instabilities of imperative thinking." #readingToday

Orchestrating certainty of outcome in a public information infrastructure, at the level of scripted contraption-building, leads to strong-coupling, and instability, because the ballistic reasoning forces one into chains of dependent actions, usually with decisions to bifurcate pathways into instability . Society has been witness to several high profile outages that have already resulted from these practices, from Software Defined Networking 267 . But getting around the limitations of engineering is both a technical and a cultural challenge in the information infrastructure world. For the reasons mentioned above, decades of teaching programmers to think in flow-charts has stymied the discussion of a sustainable, scalable approach that avoids the semantic instabilities of imperative thinking.

In Search of Certainty, Mark Burgess, 2013