More than a decade? It started back in the 1970's when Pascal and C were duking it out. Early programmers were mathematicians and they took their craft seriousl

More than a decade? It started back in the 1970's when Pascal and C were duking it out. Early programmers were mathematicians and they took their craft seriously, including safety. They designed Algol which Pascal and C came from but Pascal had the safety and C didn't. C won the battle because programmers felt saving a few CPU cycles was more important than safety. Unfortunately, Pascal had a few other issues that kept it from beating C. Wirth later came out with Modula-2 in the late 1970's, which was vastly superior to C, but it was too late to compete with C's popularity. We've been hamstrung by C and its derivatives ever since. The importance of safety became much more apparent when networking became popular but there was no turning back at that point. Now, finally, 50 years later, Rust is pulling us back toward safety in a C-syntax language.