Fantastic exchange from DConf

[Steven Schveighoffer via Digitalmars-d]

On 5/17/17 8:27 PM, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Wed, May 17, 2017 at 04:16:59PM -0700, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> On 5/17/2017 1:46 PM, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>>> People aren't willing to accept that their cherished choice of
>>> language may have been the wrong one, especially if they have
>>> invested much of their lives in mastering said language.
>>
>> It may not be the developers that initiate this change. It'll be the
>> managers and the customers who force the issue - as those are the
>> people who'll pay the bill for the problems.
>
> That may or may not force a shift to a different language. In fact, the
> odds are heavily stacked against a language change. Most management are
> concerned (and in many cases, rightly so) about the cost of rewriting
> decades-old "proven" software as opposed to merely plugging the holes in
> the existing software.  As long as they have enough coders plugging away
> at the bugs, they're likely to be inclined to say "good enough".

What will cause a shift is a continuous business loss.

If business A and B are competing in the same space, and business A has 
a larger market share, but experiences a customer data breach. Business 
B consumes many of A's customers, takes over the market, and it turns 
out that the reason B wasn't affected was that they used a memory-safe 
language.

The business cases like this will continue to pile up until it will be 
considered ignorant to use a non-memory safe language. It will be even 
more obvious when companies like B are much smaller and less funded than 
companies like A, but can still overtake them because of the advantage.

At least, this is the only way I can see C ever "dying". And of course 
by dying, I mean that it just won't be selected for large startup 
projects. It will always live on in low level libraries, and large 
existing projects (e.g. Linux).

I wonder how much something like D in betterC mode can take over some of 
these tasks?

-Steve