Thread by @relizarov

It is year 2018 and people still write articles on how C++ is a good language that is better than C, so let me twitterize a piece from 1980 Turing Award lecture by C.A.R Hoare here. Keep in mind that it was written almost from 40 years ago! (thread)

"Security: The principle that every syntactically incorrect program should be rejected by the compiler and that every syntactically correct program should give a result or an error message that was predictable and comprehensible in terms of the source language program itself."

"Thus no core dumps should ever be necessary. It was logically impossible for
any source language program to cause the computer to run wild, either at compile time or at run time."

"A consequence of this principle is that every occurrence of every subscript was on every occasion checked at run time against both the upper and the lower declared bounds of the array."

"Many years later we asked our customers whether they wished us to provide an option to switch off these checks in the interests of efficiency on production runs."

"Unanimously, they urged us not to -- they already knew how frequently subscript errors occur on production runs where failure to detect them could be disastrous."

"I note with fear and horror that even in 1980, language designers and users
have not learned this lesson. In any respectable branch of engineering, failure to observe such elementary precautions would have long been against the law."

Now, in 2018 this strikes me with even more fear and horror that we still have not had learned this lesson. It is a shame on our IT profession. It is a collective failure of our education and software industry. A failure of epic proportions, having disastrous effects.

If you are interested in the full story from C.A.R. Hoare, here is the link to pdf: cacm.acm.org/magazines/1981…