Because it was an error! I could have done better by doing the thing that fixed the error!
I am not a religious person, but the Lord save us from those who have an excuse for everything.
> the Lord save us from those who have an excuse for everything.
Lord save us from people who think self-flagellation is at all useful or beneficial to anything. It's status-signalling and nothing else, you're in hypothetically the same situation as someone else (having made a mistake) but you want to claim to be superior because you're feeling the most bad about it?
In this post [1] we see you arguing that everyone makes mistakes, yet here you seem unable to recognize it as the obvious answer to your question. Perhaps not coincidentally, a failure to be semantically consistent is a common root cause of programming errors.
> So answer the rest of my questions - you could have, you didn't. Why not?
As a rule, I try to avoid responding to utter nonsense, though I must admit to breaking that rule in this thread.
> yet here you seem unable to recognize it as the obvious answer to your question.
I'm the one who is insistent that it was a mistake and that people make mistakes. You're the one insisting there's some loophole where you can both get it wrong and feel good that you could have got it right, at the same time. I'm saying that it's your position which is utter nonsense, a meaningless double-think designed to make you feel good, which reflects nothing about the world.
Like a kid saying “I ate ten hot dogs and threw up, but I could have eaten fifteen!” - nobody believes it, you couldn’t, you’re trying to save face and get credit for eating fifteen hotdogs without actually doing it.
Now, whether you can do better in future is a different matter - I’m not saying you can’t do things to avoid that mistake happening again, or learn from experience, or get better.
This is bizarre. Where on earth did you get the idea that I am arguing that one could have not made a mistake? The whole issue is about one's attitude and behavior after having done so.
I am not going to consider anything else you write here until you clear up that mystery, which seems to be the root of your confusion.
"I did not do X, therefore I could have done X" seems clearly false. How do you know you could have done better? And if you could, why didn't you? And if you actually didn't, what does it usefully mean to say you "could have"?
You "could have" done better but didn't, does that imply you didn't want to do better? Is that what you want to communicate - you wanted your code to be worse - because that isn't in your favour either. You wanted to do better and didn't do better, that's back to implying you wanted to but weren't able to, i.e. you couldn't.