Typesafety versus Worse is Better - was Re: Fwd: is there any word processing software for the pdp11?

On Wed, Dec 3, 2014 at 9:21 AM, Sean Caron <scaron at umich.edu> wrote: Of what use is a newborn baby? Of *course* it's of no value if you stop at turning them into a novice. But if they're actually a *good* programmer, they'll become proficient in another language. I would go so far as to say that if they don't become proficient in another language, given a reasonable chance to do so, they aren't actually a good programmer, any C programming ability notwithstanding. And continue writing software that has vulnerabilities. When the tools don't provide support for writing reliable software, reliable software mostly doesn't get written. For every CERT advisory of a vulnerability, there are still a huge number that have gone undetected so far. C advocates always claim that a good programmer will write reliable code in C, and in a vanishingly small number of cases that's true, but the reality is that 99.9999% of C code has bugs that either: 1) could have been caught by static analysis in a language with even slightly better semantics (including strong typing) 2) could have been caught at runtime if the language semantics could reasonably support bounds checking. In this case the software would still have a bug, but at worst it would result in denial of service rather than privilege escalation and information leakage. (Then there's the problem of people that use runtime checking during software testing to protect their valuable test data, but turn runtime checking off for production, but that's an argument for another day.) There has been a huge amount of research into how to solve those problems in C, with only partial results. It's a difficult and perhaps intractable problem because C is a portable assembly language, with correspondingly low level semantics The "easy" way to solve the problem is not coming up with bandaids for C, or trying to better train C programmers; it is to abandon C for a reasonable language. This doesn't happen at least in part due to managers seeing a huge glut of C programmers on the market. When all you've got is a hammer... Note that the same arguments apply to C++. While C++ is no longer a proper superset of C, it still is close to being one. C++ advocates will point out that a lot of the new stuff in C++ is safer than the old C stuff, but unfortunately as long as the old C stuff is in there, it gets used and causes the same old problems. Rather than C++ being a better language than C, it's a worse language, because it has *all* of the C defects, plus additional new ones.