This article begins with victim blaming the software engineers in full-throated support of hardware engineers. If, and I do mean if, anyone should be exalted it

This article begins with victim blaming the software engineers in full-throated support of hardware engineers. If, and I do mean if, anyone should be exalted it is the fact that software engineers have been coping with C as a stable-but-difficult programming language specifically for the benefit of the hardware engineers’ desire to have a stable target. The fact that the specification is ambiguous at all is so that hardware manufacturers can port a reasonably small, expressive, and powerful language to their hardware. And, no, making a new language that targets the platform for the ease of hardware development and exploitation of system-specific benefits is not the answer. In fact, it’s the literal reason why C is still as popular as it is. Nobody wants to learn your programming language, write thousands-to-millions of dollars worth of software, just to have it become obsolete two days after the new-hotness processor comes out. Been there, done that. Alternatively, perhaps, we can place the blame on hardware manufacturers who were looking to cut corners for improved performance and produced insecure machines because they lied to us non-expert hardware users about how fast their systems could go and what we were getting for our money.