The vast majority of people writing C that I've seen in the past 20 years are occasional C programmers. We write in higher-level languages, and occasionally dr

The vast majority of people writing C that I've seen in the past 20 years are occasional C programmers. We write in higher-level languages, and occasionally drop down into C to troubleshoot a library we're using. I haven't been a full-time C programmer since late last century. I see C code these days and think "huh, so that's valid in C now". I get that you are a full-time C programmer, but unless you're volunteering to take on all my C troubleshooting work, this seems almost punitive. Like building a balcony with no railing, because nobody would just walk off a ledge -- and yet, sadly, professionals still die from falls. To say that all such people are "clueless", regardless of skill or training or experience, is to fall back on the old test pilot mentality: the good survive, therefore, if you didn't survive, you (retroactively) must not have had The Right Stuff after all. Joel Spolsky explained the reasoning more eloquently than I could: "Now, even without going through with this experiment, I can state with some confidence that some of the users will simply fail to complete the task, or will take an extraordinary amount of time doing it. I don’t mean to say that these users are stupid. Quite the contrary, they are probably highly intelligent, or maybe they are accomplished athletes, but vis-à-vis your program, they are just not applying all of their motor skills and brain cells to the usage of your program. You’re only getting about 30% of their attention, so you have to make do with a user who, from inside the computer, does not appear to be playing with a full deck." I trust myself and the people I work with, but I still wear a hardhat when they're working overhead, and I tie all my tools to my belt when I'm working at height. It's the clueless people who don't learn from the mistakes of the past.