The Natural Philosopher  writes:
> On 01/05/18 11:46, Andy Leighton wrote:
>>> C sits nicely between  the overwight syntax and non portability of
>>> assembler, and teh ineffeicient and unintelligent langeuages of computer
>>> scientists, who instead of respecting the hardware upon which their code
>>> nust run, as COBOL, FORTRAN and B/BCPL/C did, instead ignore it in their
>>> search for symmetry elegance and presumably geek status, whils what they
>>> have implemented rumbles along overblown and overweight and bug filled.
>> Now you are trolling. I have written stuff in a number of assembly
>> languages, and in C and wouldn't say anything close to that.
>
> Well so have I, and I would.
>
> Modern code is appalling.

So is old code. Unix V7 had obvious security howlers and rather more
obscure bugs (dmr had a good page with the latter). Sendmail enabled the
first big Internet worm. The reasons we see more vulnerabilities now
than (say) the early 1990s is that there is overwhelmingly more software
to have bugs in, and more effort put into actually finding them rather
than just believing it’s all good without any actual evidence.

As for C, most C programmers don’t engage with the language as actually
specified but rather with incomplete models (“I know how it maps to
machine code”). Unsurprisingly the result is a stream of
bugs. Fortunately more modern langauges have a more robust design.

--
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/

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