6 ms·

Being completely serious, people will use whatever works. If what works is written in C, people will use it. The average person seriously doesn't care what lang

Being completely serious, people will use whatever works. If what works is written in C, people will use it. The average person seriously doesn't care what language a thing is written in. The average person cares that the software in question works. Despite being written in C, most software today works reasonably well. Is it perfect? No. Will the rusty equivalent be perfect on day 1? No.

wmf 2y ago
Yeah, we know the market won't solve this. That's why people are talking about government standards.
- grandempire 2y ago
  When you can’t convince people it’s better, you need to force them to do it.
  - wakawaka28 2y ago
    Did you forget a /s? It seems that if you can't convince a majority of programmers that your new language is good enough to learn, maybe it actually isn't as good as its proponents claim. It is likely the case that rewriting everything in a new language for marginally less bugs is a worse outcome than just dealing with the bugs.
    - grandempire 2y ago
      I agree. I don’t think we need a government computer language force. Terry is a prophet.
      - wakawaka28 2y ago
        Mind you, the government has tried this before with Ada. Not to knock Ada but let's just say that government would ruin everything and stifle the industry. Certainly, any new regulations about anything as broad as how memory is allowed to be managed is going to strangle the software industry.
        StellarScience 2y ago
        Ada was an impressive language for its day. But even with Ada, government never mandated its use generally - only for certain government projects, and waivers were available with justification. And as industry took the lead in language innovation, government removed its Ada requirement.
- Nevermark 2y ago
  I can't help but think that those lazy mathematicians might benefit from a congressional order to clean up that twin prime problem too. If memory safety was "just the right regulations" easy, it would have already been solved. Every competent developer loves getting things right. I can imagine a lot more "compliance" than success may be the result of any "progress" with that approach. The basic problem is challenging, but makes it hard-hard is the addition of a mountain of incidental complexity. Memory safety as a retrofit on languages, tools and code bases is a much bigger challenge than starting with something simple and memory safe, and then working back up to something with all the bells and whistles that mature tool ecosystems provide for squeaking out that last bit of efficiency. Programs get judged 100% on efficiency (how fast can you get this working? how fast does it run? how much is our energy/hardware/cloud bill?), and only 99% or so on safety. If the world decided it could get by on a big drop in software/computer performance for a few years while we restarted with safer/simpler tools, change would be quick. But the economics would favor every defector so much that ... that approach is completely unrealistic. It is going to get solved. The payoff is too high, and the pain is too great, for it not to. But not based on a concept of a plan or regulation.
  - lmm 2y ago
    > If memory safety was "just the right regulations" easy, it would have already been solved. Memory safety is already a solved problem in regulated industries. It's not a hard problem as such. People just don't want to solve it and don't have any incentive to: companies aren't penalised for writing buggy software, and individual engineers are if anything rewarded for it. > Every competent developer loves getting things right. Unfortunately a lot of developers care more about being able to claim mastery of something hard. No-one gets cred for just writing the thing in Java and not worrying about memory issues, even though that's been a better technical choice for decades for the overwhelming majority of cases.
    - wakawaka28 2y ago
      Regulated industries have overwhelmingly boring and expensive software compared to others. They do things like banning recursion and dynamic arrays lol. Memory safety in every aspect possible just isn't worth it for most applications. And the degree of memory safety that is worth it is a lot less than Rust developers seem to think, and the degree of memory safety granted by Rust is less than they think as well.
- wakawaka28 2y ago
  If this has to be forced, it probably isn't necessary or very beneficial. How much will it cost to conform to these "standards" versus not? Who stands to gain by making non-conformant software illegal? I think it is clearly far too expensive to rewrite all software and retrain all programmers to conform to arbitrary standards. Hardware solutions to improve memory safety already exist and may ultimately be the best way to achieve the goal. It seems to me that Rust programmers, unhappy with the pace of adoption of Rust, seek to make other languages illegal because they do things different from Rust.

wmf 2y ago

Yeah, we know the market won't solve this. That's why people are talking about government standards.

grandempire 2y ago
When you can’t convince people it’s better, you need to force them to do it.
- wakawaka28 2y ago
  Did you forget a /s? It seems that if you can't convince a majority of programmers that your new language is good enough to learn, maybe it actually isn't as good as its proponents claim. It is likely the case that rewriting everything in a new language for marginally less bugs is a worse outcome than just dealing with the bugs.
  - grandempire 2y ago
    I agree. I don’t think we need a government computer language force. Terry is a prophet.
    - wakawaka28 2y ago
      Mind you, the government has tried this before with Ada. Not to knock Ada but let's just say that government would ruin everything and stifle the industry. Certainly, any new regulations about anything as broad as how memory is allowed to be managed is going to strangle the software industry.
      - StellarScience 2y ago
        Ada was an impressive language for its day. But even with Ada, government never mandated its use generally - only for certain government projects, and waivers were available with justification. And as industry took the lead in language innovation, government removed its Ada requirement.
Nevermark 2y ago
I can't help but think that those lazy mathematicians might benefit from a congressional order to clean up that twin prime problem too. If memory safety was "just the right regulations" easy, it would have already been solved. Every competent developer loves getting things right. I can imagine a lot more "compliance" than success may be the result of any "progress" with that approach. The basic problem is challenging, but makes it hard-hard is the addition of a mountain of incidental complexity. Memory safety as a retrofit on languages, tools and code bases is a much bigger challenge than starting with something simple and memory safe, and then working back up to something with all the bells and whistles that mature tool ecosystems provide for squeaking out that last bit of efficiency. Programs get judged 100% on efficiency (how fast can you get this working? how fast does it run? how much is our energy/hardware/cloud bill?), and only 99% or so on safety. If the world decided it could get by on a big drop in software/computer performance for a few years while we restarted with safer/simpler tools, change would be quick. But the economics would favor every defector so much that ... that approach is completely unrealistic. It is going to get solved. The payoff is too high, and the pain is too great, for it not to. But not based on a concept of a plan or regulation.
- lmm 2y ago
  > If memory safety was "just the right regulations" easy, it would have already been solved. Memory safety is already a solved problem in regulated industries. It's not a hard problem as such. People just don't want to solve it and don't have any incentive to: companies aren't penalised for writing buggy software, and individual engineers are if anything rewarded for it. > Every competent developer loves getting things right. Unfortunately a lot of developers care more about being able to claim mastery of something hard. No-one gets cred for just writing the thing in Java and not worrying about memory issues, even though that's been a better technical choice for decades for the overwhelming majority of cases.
  - wakawaka28 2y ago
    Regulated industries have overwhelmingly boring and expensive software compared to others. They do things like banning recursion and dynamic arrays lol. Memory safety in every aspect possible just isn't worth it for most applications. And the degree of memory safety that is worth it is a lot less than Rust developers seem to think, and the degree of memory safety granted by Rust is less than they think as well.
wakawaka28 2y ago
If this has to be forced, it probably isn't necessary or very beneficial. How much will it cost to conform to these "standards" versus not? Who stands to gain by making non-conformant software illegal? I think it is clearly far too expensive to rewrite all software and retrain all programmers to conform to arbitrary standards. Hardware solutions to improve memory safety already exist and may ultimately be the best way to achieve the goal. It seems to me that Rust programmers, unhappy with the pace of adoption of Rust, seek to make other languages illegal because they do things different from Rust.