The discussion was fun. And seems evenly split, at a quick reading.

More, I think it split on how you read it. If you view it as an absolute maxim to excuse poor implementations, it is panned. If you view it as a good faith behavior not to choke on the first mistake, you probably like it.

This is akin to grammar police. In life encounters, there is no real place for grammar policing. However, you should try to be grammatically correct.

> This is akin to grammar police. In life encounters, there is no real place for grammar policing. However, you should try to be grammatically correct.

That's because most humans have feelings. But most machines don't. So that's not comparable.

I meant that grammar policing does little to help the exchange of information. Feelings aside.

A lack of enforced language standards does end up producing a language full of difficult-to-learn inconsistencies, though.

It makes difficult to codify inconsistencies. Most aren't that difficult to learn, oddly. Especially if you are just trying to be conversational.

Edit: I'm specifically going off evidence of teaching my kids. They have basically picked up language completely by talking to us. Even pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, etc. What they have not learned, is the reasons some words are used when another could have worked.