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> Its up to the developers to make their programs safe and reliable. No language to date will do that for them. But languages do make a huge contribution. For
by willtim 9y ago
> Its up to the developers to make their programs safe and reliable. No language to date will do that for them.
But languages do make a huge contribution. For example, Rust, Ada and Modula-3 are all much safer by defaults alone compared to C. Most Rust code sits outside unsafe blocks, so the existence of this feature does not prove there is no point to Rust.
- falcolas 9y ago> does not prove there is no point to Rust. I didn't say anything along those lines. I said that it's up to developers to make their programs safe. Defaults matter, no doubt. But they are not a silver bullet; greater base safety can even cause people to become lax when thinking about safety, resulting in even bigger problems. Why do Python developers accept and parse untrusted pickle objects? Because Python is safe, and they don't have to think about what's going on under the hood. It's indirectly related to computer programming, but a study was done in Europe which showed that crashes in AWD vechicles were, on average, much more severe than 2WD vehicles. Why? Because of the added stability of AWD, people drove faster in adverse conditions.