> But programmers have to learn first and foremost to take responsibility; That's not going to happen as long as all our licenses include something like "This

> But programmers have to learn first and foremost to take responsibility; That's not going to happen as long as all our licenses include something like "This software is distributed WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE." > if you're writing code that ... Being careful (I'd add: learn how to be careful) is a good platitude, though might as well just say so without the ifs. Especially for open source, you don't always know the context in which your program will run. There's responsibility of the dev, but also responsibility of downstream users. When companies wrap a cli program behind a web server they're asking for trouble. Not failing on the data parse example above is expected of competent C/C++ programmers. I do think these days if you're going to use such languages outside of well-defined low-security-impact targets like non-networked games you're morally obligated to be better than competent. I can't change what exists though. Managed languages help so much. I do think Java achieved its mission statement of dragging many C++ programmers halfway to Common Lisp (if halfway is a GC) and preventing many security bugs, but if more people were to go all the way, I think Naggum points to a big obstacle I don't know how to overcome: "What has to go before Common Lisp will conquer the world is the belief that passing unadorned machine words around is safe just because some external force has «approved» the exchange of those machine words."