Fixing C's Biggest Mistake

[areYouSureAboutThat]

On Friday, 30 December 2022 at 20:38:52 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 12/29/2022 7:04 PM, monkyyy wrote:
>> [...]
>
> Please reconsider your "every attempt" statement. It's a 
> surefire way to disaster.
>
>
>> [...]
>
> Sorry, but again, that is attempting to write perfect software. 
> It is *impossible* to do. Humans aren't capable of doing it, 
> and from what I read about the space shuttle software is it is 
> terrifyingly expensive to do all that checking and so it does 
> not scale.
>
> The right way is not to imagine one can write perfect software. 
> It is to have a plan for what to do *when* the software fails. 
> Because it *will* fail.
>
> For example, a friend of mine years ago told me he was using a 
> password manager for his hundreds of passwords to keep them 
> safe. I told him it that the PWM is a single point of failure, 
> and when it failed it would compromise all of his passwords. He 
> dismissed the idea, saying he trusted the password manager 
> company.
>
> Fast forward to today. LastPass, which is what he was relying 
> on, failed. Now all his hundreds of passwords are compromised.

Yes, no matter how correct the software is, no matter how 
perfectly memory safe the programming langauge is, it all comes 
back to 'the unanticipated interactions' - which cannot be 
avoided if you live in our universe.

The fate of software is never just in the hands of the 
progrmammer.