do:
        thing()
        thing()
        if condition:
            continue

Those cases involving eminent domain and rats are the most dramatic, but it works at a more pedestrian level too. Say a government wants to dispose of some disused rail-yard or something. A developer who says "I'm going build some big shiny shops and attractions here" has better optics than a developer who says "I'm going to lay down some infrastructure and parcel the land up to whoever wants to buy it, nature will decide what the land is used for".

The latter is actually quite likely to produce the higher economic value land use, but there is no good political narrative. And in a world of strict zoning rules, there might not even be a legal framework for it.

You also need people to ride it. It wouldn't fly as a palace amusement because the king (and more importantly the little prince) would keep falling off. They won't have an incentive to value the skill until there is a horde of middle-class, 19th century, hipsters showing him up.

A circus act is more plausible, but only if there's some continuum of other simpler circus equipment leading up to this rather sophisticated bit of engineering.

The assumption here is that every thing works in a clear way so you can see the military or whatever advantages of a particular phenomenon. Now I don't know if AnimalMuppet is literally correct that the bureaucracy simply shut down the steel industry -- but if it happened it would be because all that cheep steel was not being used for obvious things, like the imperial army, but for other unexpected uses. Maybe arms and armour still had to be made the old fashioned way anyhow, so there was no immediate military advantage.

More likely, things were subtler. Things innovations can strangled long before their importance is clear. Imperial China had a vibrant merchant class, but it isn't the kind of place that is likely to tolerate the "disruptive innovation" which fuelled Britain's Industrial Revolution -- where a bunch of upstarts come and do things with unexpected things. Even modern China (or for that matter the modern United States) struggles with it.

Another part is hiring a breed of test engineers who like breaking stuff and have a knack for it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7Xgd7Cjm98

There's whole classes of highly paid engineers whose job is to do this. But they work for old fashioned, boring, companies.

And then fall over?

I miss the days of The Slashdot Effect[1]. Now it's the JS that makes my PC fall over.

[1] Come to think of it The Slashdot Effect would have been a good band name back in the '90s.

Depends on the algorithms that use that code. Two separate arrays is not a bad way to represent a vector-of-tuples. And so if you think of everything as a vectorised operation (and if that makes sense for your use case) then the code can be clean enough.

Efficiency-wise it depends on how the locality of reference falls out. There are cases where it's more cache-efficient to store the pairs next to each other, but again for big vectorised operations you might lose nothing by using two cache-ways instead of one.

wpa_supplicant is an application of the "do one thing" philosophy. The kernel provides a some basic hardware-abstracted plumbing which lets a specialist tool do all the complicated handshaking and what-not for wireless.

This saves the basic tools (ifconfig, ip) from having to build in all that wireless complexity. But it does introduce an extra moving part that has to be configured. For this reason, just bloating it into the basic tool is likely to be good enough, and also provider a superior UX (for nerds like us).

And though I tend to be a GUI hater, Unison is one tool where I find the GUI much more useful than the command line alone. The game is to iteratively come up with a set of rules which Unison will use to into effect on your dataset. The GUI quickly show you the effect of your current rules, and lets you propose the next iteration etc.

In my experience IP corresponds specifically to legally recognised property in otherwise copyable information.

Then the business world can pay for it through ticket prices.

I've been using wpa_supplicant under the hood for ages, but only recently learned anything about it... and it's actually very good, except that it's CLI interface is so low-level and difficult to use.

Even if you just want to write a practical interpreter, and choose to gloss over the issues, they will still come back in some disguised form and either by requiring some sort of implementation kludge, or just by creating weird edge cases.