3 ms·

It pretty much addresses your core thesis and shows it to be based on a fictional retelling of history.

titzer 5y ago
Which in itself was a distraction from my core point that C is a hazardous material. Instead of having that conversation, they wanted to drag it into mudslinging, making it about good (heroic! doer) and bad (lazy! talker) people, and profoundly misunderstood history. We don't vilify people who invented asbestos. We don't vilify workers who installed asbestos. They didn't know better. When we did start to know better, there was a period of denial and even willful ignorance, but eventually the evidence became overwhelming. But now, we know about asbestos, and we're stuck with the consequences to exactly the extent we don't engage in careful cleanups. With the dangers of profoundly unsafe code, we haven't even gotten everyone on the same page yet. It's a long process. As far talking, I had hoped we could avoid the immature shouty part, as I explicitly acknowledged the many people who put in a lot of work to make C/C++ do things and run fast. For the doing, I guess I'll be getting back to that. It's far more rewarding than these discussions, frankly.
- staticassertion 5y ago
  Frankly it's a bit hard to untangle your point from the way you write. Something to consider. > and profoundly misunderstood history. There seems to be a good deal of that. > They didn't know better. For what it's worth, we always knew better with C and C++. As I mentioned elsewhere languages were often designed to be safer but as C became more popular the design mistakes of C were pushed on other languages. You can look at FORTRAN, Algol, etc, to see that compiler writers took measures to ensure certain bug classes weren't possible, and those languages were overtaken by those who wanted their code to just compile, correct or not. Your post definitely comes across as very preachy, so it's odd that you say you were trying to "avoid the immature shouty part" - that's what the parent was basically criticizing you for. And then to end it on the implication, once again, that some people are "doers" while the rest of us are just posting on HN (the same thing you are doing????) kinda exemplifies it.

Which in itself was a distraction from my core point that C is a hazardous material. Instead of having that conversation, they wanted to drag it into mudslinging, making it about good (heroic! doer) and bad (lazy! talker) people, and profoundly misunderstood history. We don't vilify people who invented asbestos. We don't vilify workers who installed asbestos. They didn't know better. When we did start to know better, there was a period of denial and even willful ignorance, but eventually the evidence became overwhelming. But now, we know about asbestos, and we're stuck with the consequences to exactly the extent we don't engage in careful cleanups. With the dangers of profoundly unsafe code, we haven't even gotten everyone on the same page yet. It's a long process. As far talking, I had hoped we could avoid the immature shouty part, as I explicitly acknowledged the many people who put in a lot of work to make C/C++ do things and run fast. For the doing, I guess I'll be getting back to that. It's far more rewarding than these discussions, frankly.

staticassertion 5y ago
Frankly it's a bit hard to untangle your point from the way you write. Something to consider. > and profoundly misunderstood history. There seems to be a good deal of that. > They didn't know better. For what it's worth, we always knew better with C and C++. As I mentioned elsewhere languages were often designed to be safer but as C became more popular the design mistakes of C were pushed on other languages. You can look at FORTRAN, Algol, etc, to see that compiler writers took measures to ensure certain bug classes weren't possible, and those languages were overtaken by those who wanted their code to just compile, correct or not. Your post definitely comes across as very preachy, so it's odd that you say you were trying to "avoid the immature shouty part" - that's what the parent was basically criticizing you for. And then to end it on the implication, once again, that some people are "doers" while the rest of us are just posting on HN (the same thing you are doing????) kinda exemplifies it.