C's Biggest Mistake on Hacker News

[Jim Balter]

On Monday, 23 July 2018 at 22:45:15 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 7/23/2018 5:39 AM, Joakim wrote:
>> In my experience, people never learn, even from the blatantly 
>> obvious, _particularly_ when they're invested in the outdated. 
>> What inevitably happens is the new tech gets good enough to 
>> put them out of business, then they finally pick it up or 
>> retire. Until most system software is written in 
>> D/Go/Rust/Swift/Zig/etc., they will keep mouthing platitudes 
>> about how C is here to stay.
>
> I've predicted before that what will kill C is managers and 
> customers requiring memory safety because unsafeness costs them 
> millions. The "just hire better programmers" will never work.

It ought to be obvious that "just use better tools" is far 
cheaper and more effective, but I think one of the problems is 
something that I also see in politics quite a bit: a lot of 
people are more interested in feeling superior or punishing 
people for their flaws than in avoiding bad outcomes. And there's 
also the magical "if only everyone would ..." thinking. If you 
want to get everyone to do something they aren't currently doing, 
you need some *causal mechanism* (and it has to be feasible, 
which "avoid all mistakes through discipline" is not).