Ladies and gentlemen, the C programming language. It’s a classic. It is blindingly, quicksilver fast, because it’s about as close to the bone of the machine as you can get. It is time-tested and ubiquitous. And it is terrifyingly dangerous.
The author's biggest issue with the C language seems to be security holes:
If you write code in C, you have to be careful not to introduce subtle bugs that can turn into massive security holes — and as anyone who ever wrote software knows, you cannot be perfectly careful all of the time.
The author claims that the Rust language is a modern answer to these issues and should replace C (and C++). It does look that Rust can run C code, so it looks like an interesting proposition. What do Soylent's coders think about this?
(Score: 2) by Marand on Friday May 08 2015, @11:35PM
>in C, you have to be careful
It's almost like you have to pay attention to what you're doing unlike in javascript. Crazy I know.
Nonsense! You have to pay attention in Javascript too or you'll hit a random gotcha and realise you've wandered into wat [destroyallsoftware.com]* territory. Not Javascript, but my favourite example is this glorious master-post of PHP insanity [eev.ee]. With PHP, "wat territory" is everything between "<?php" and "?>"
(Not trying to add to the language bashing, just a silly comment with a couple related "fun" links.)
* JS portion of video starts at 1:20.