"The value of values". Indeed. Q.e.d. No notes.

Yes, for many scenarios this is "not even an academic exercise".

For a very select few applications this is Gold. Finally serious linear algebra crunch for the taking. (Without custom GPU tapeout.)

With "goto" the cleanup-up can jump anywhere. With "defer" the cleanup cannot really jump anywhere. It is easier to mentally stick to simply cleaning up in a common sense way. And taking care of multiple "unrelated" clean-up steps is "handled for you."

(Attacks on this sometimes approach complaints about lack of "common sense".)

Cleanup is good. Jumping around with "goto" confused most people in practice. It seems highly likely that most programmers model "defer" differently in their minds.

EDIT:

IIRC it was CVE-2025-26465. Read the code and the patch.

Computing and formal mathematics rely on exhaustive case analysis and binary logic. And even with The Excluded Middle, there are unprovable statements.

There are at least two incompatible ternary truth tables (hello there SQL NULL) in formal logic. Then there is fuzzy logic, but that is also a formalization.

(NP-complete problems and uncomputable problems in binary logic are another sore point.)

And for informal systems the best people have found so far is hypothesis testing, which is to say that only the rejection of hypothesis based on measurements works, but not confirming a hypothesis.

Turtles and blech all the way down.

Basically, many incentives are "misaligned" in such a way, that micromanaging demise is (locally) considered more valuable than actually bringing in cash from customers by actually giving them something.

As long as the company's owners don't pick up on this and are effective at doing something about it, "all bets are off."

102. One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.

— Alan J. Perlis, Yale

Thinking clearly is just as relevant or encumbering as it always was.