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In my experience, people who shoot themselves in the foot with a magnetized needle are the same people who will shoot themselves in the foot with any other prog

In my experience, people who shoot themselves in the foot with a magnetized needle are the same people who will shoot themselves in the foot with any other programming technique. Those who aren't careful enough to only flip the bits they intend to when programming with a magnetized needle are the same types of people who overflow buffers in C. You can't fix lack of knowledge with a compiler. You can only catch accidental mistakes, but that assumes that the norm is for the person to know what they are doing and a lot of people have only superficial knowledge of the tools they are using. We already have accident catching tools for magnetized needles. What a magnetic needle doesn't have is a helmet, training wheels and padded walls, which is by design.

10x-dev 5y ago
It's telling that you chose to omit my memory leak example. Weak developers blame the tools.
- catlifeonmars 5y ago
  Quoting from the article: > AS IT TURNS OUT, good craftspeople don't shy away from questioning, criticizing, and trying to improve their tools (or even switching to other tools entirely!) C is the best tool for a lot of use cases, but no tool can be a perfect fit for every use case. This is the reason that multiple programming languages exist and the world has not converged on using only C everywhere. Also, there are properties not intrinsic to the language that also affect the fit.
  - 10x-dev 5y ago
    Saying "it's easy to shoot yourself in the foot with C" is not constructive criticism because what's easy for you could be difficult for me. If the Rust fanboy brigade could articulate actual criticism for C, such as the lack of imports, or eskewing the type system with void*, or the signedness of char, or any of the other topics beaten to death in online "C gotchas" power point presentations, then we could have a constructive conversation amongst craftspeople.
    - catlifeonmars 5y ago
      > Saying "it's easy to shoot yourself in the foot with C" is not constructive criticism because what's easy for you could be difficult for me. That’s a fair point. Unfortunately I think that in order to really talk about the pros and cons, we’d need a relatively specific situation. Toy examples are just that… toy examples. FWIW most of the time I will make language choices based on the expected lifetime of a particular project, the relative expertise of team members working on a project, and the ease of delivering bug fixes.
    - Yoric 5y ago
      I believe that Rust users are past caring about that. If you feel that C is a good language for your needs, then by all means, use it. I know that Rust brings me a very efficient safety net that lets me concentrate on the algorithm [1] without having to also spend quite as much time auditing, fuzzing, valgrinding and {thread, memory, ...} sanitizing my code. In addition to the safety added by the type-system, I also enjoy the convenience of tools such as `Drop`, or the ability to derive (de)serializers for most formats, etc. This is not about criticizing C. This is about picking the best tool for the job. Sometimes, it is Rust. Sometimes, it is TypeScript. I haven't encountered a job for which C was the best tool for me in a while. I'm sure that there are cases, mind you, but I don't encounter them anymore. [1] With caveats, of course. As all Rust users, I need to please the borrow-checker gods.

10x-dev 5y ago

It's telling that you chose to omit my memory leak example. Weak developers blame the tools.

catlifeonmars 5y ago
Quoting from the article: > AS IT TURNS OUT, good craftspeople don't shy away from questioning, criticizing, and trying to improve their tools (or even switching to other tools entirely!) C is the best tool for a lot of use cases, but no tool can be a perfect fit for every use case. This is the reason that multiple programming languages exist and the world has not converged on using only C everywhere. Also, there are properties not intrinsic to the language that also affect the fit.
- 10x-dev 5y ago
  Saying "it's easy to shoot yourself in the foot with C" is not constructive criticism because what's easy for you could be difficult for me. If the Rust fanboy brigade could articulate actual criticism for C, such as the lack of imports, or eskewing the type system with void*, or the signedness of char, or any of the other topics beaten to death in online "C gotchas" power point presentations, then we could have a constructive conversation amongst craftspeople.
  - catlifeonmars 5y ago
    > Saying "it's easy to shoot yourself in the foot with C" is not constructive criticism because what's easy for you could be difficult for me. That’s a fair point. Unfortunately I think that in order to really talk about the pros and cons, we’d need a relatively specific situation. Toy examples are just that… toy examples. FWIW most of the time I will make language choices based on the expected lifetime of a particular project, the relative expertise of team members working on a project, and the ease of delivering bug fixes.
  - Yoric 5y ago
    I believe that Rust users are past caring about that. If you feel that C is a good language for your needs, then by all means, use it. I know that Rust brings me a very efficient safety net that lets me concentrate on the algorithm [1] without having to also spend quite as much time auditing, fuzzing, valgrinding and {thread, memory, ...} sanitizing my code. In addition to the safety added by the type-system, I also enjoy the convenience of tools such as `Drop`, or the ability to derive (de)serializers for most formats, etc. This is not about criticizing C. This is about picking the best tool for the job. Sometimes, it is Rust. Sometimes, it is TypeScript. I haven't encountered a job for which C was the best tool for me in a while. I'm sure that there are cases, mind you, but I don't encounter them anymore. [1] With caveats, of course. As all Rust users, I need to please the borrow-checker gods.