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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: 3, Insightful) by Nerdfest on Saturday May 09 2015, @12:28AM
True, but some languages *encourage* the writing of code that is insecure and hard to maintain. I've never considered C one of those languages though. Visual Basic, JavaScript, and a few others, yes, but not C. I've certainly seen my share of bad C and wouldn't choose it over some other languages for writing the most maintainable code, but I don't think it encourages the bad habits I see in other languages.