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> If you do anything I am relying on, I do not want to hear that you use such "easy" language, period. If you are careless enough to rely on people not making m

> If you do anything I am relying on, I do not want to hear that you use such "easy" language, period. If you are careless enough to rely on people not making mistakes, I do not want to deal with you. And if I am working on ensuring high reliability, I will choose tools that provide as much guarantees as possible, artificial simplicity be damned. This to me is a bit absurd. First of all, the "easy" language he's referring to here is C, and if I read this correctly it sounds like he's saying any software written in C is not worth using, which is patently absurd. Regardless of whether that's actually his viewpoint, programs and libraries which are well-written, in any language, are simply tools which one can use without needing to worry about what language they're implemented in or whether or not the author used generics or pointers or whatever. Language matters if you're writing the code, reading it, or linking against it, and otherwise it's not worth worrying about (as a general rule). Of course, if the tool or library in question is slow or resource intensive, this might be due to language choice, but poorly written, buggy, and underfeatured code can be written in any language. Choose the language that suits you, suits your team, and suits your project.

jeffdavis 10y ago
You are ignoring the security implications of using buggy software; and the risks that users of C code are taking.
fiedzia 10y ago
> he's saying any software written in C is not worth using, which is patently absurd. I'm saying that choosing C guarantees a lot of problems for users. You will have such amount of bugs, that as a user, I refuse to be your beta-tester. > programs and libraries which are well-written, in any language, are simply tools Some languages make creating well-written program much harder than others. There is strong correlation between "its written in C" and "it exposes your ssh keys". > Language matters if you're writing the code, reading it, or linking against it, and otherwise it's not worth worrying about It also matters when you estimate code quality and likelihood of your data being exposed or corrupted or a time from "it compiles" to "we feel safe to use it in production". Its not the only factor, and perhaps not the most important one in many cases, but I believe in value of formal verification more then I believe in humans ability to get millions of malloc/free pairs right. > poorly written, buggy, and underfeatured code can be written in any language Again, in theory yes, in practice some languages make it much easier than others.

jeffdavis 10y ago

You are ignoring the security implications of using buggy software; and the risks that users of C code are taking.

fiedzia 10y ago

> he's saying any software written in C is not worth using, which is patently absurd. I'm saying that choosing C guarantees a lot of problems for users. You will have such amount of bugs, that as a user, I refuse to be your beta-tester. > programs and libraries which are well-written, in any language, are simply tools Some languages make creating well-written program much harder than others. There is strong correlation between "its written in C" and "it exposes your ssh keys". > Language matters if you're writing the code, reading it, or linking against it, and otherwise it's not worth worrying about It also matters when you estimate code quality and likelihood of your data being exposed or corrupted or a time from "it compiles" to "we feel safe to use it in production". Its not the only factor, and perhaps not the most important one in many cases, but I believe in value of formal verification more then I believe in humans ability to get millions of malloc/free pairs right. > poorly written, buggy, and underfeatured code can be written in any language Again, in theory yes, in practice some languages make it much easier than others.