-We put a lot of emphasis on avoiding mistakes, both in programming and in programming culture. There are horror stories of how small bugs in a program caused enormous pain for those involved. The morals of those stories illuminate that a simple mistake can be costly and we need to be doubly careful about avoiding mistakes. All these tales do is make programmers paranoid about making any mistakes at all, and when we operate in a fear-based mode we begin to panic. Telling programmers to make no mistakes is similar to telling someone not to be afraid: they become more afraid of being afraid.
+We put a lot of emphasis on avoiding mistakes, both in programming and in programming culture. There are horror stories of how small bugs in a program caused enormous pain for those involved. The moral of these stories illuminate that simple mistakes can be costly and we need to be doubly careful about avoiding mistakes. These anecdotes are told in the hopes that they'll somehow scare developers into being more cautious, but they can have the opposite effect. They can make programmers paranoid about making any mistakes at all, and when we operate in a fear-based mode we begin to panic. Telling programmers to make no mistakes is similar to telling someone not to be afraid: they become more afraid of being afraid.