[TUHS] [SPAM] Re: C vs the world (was Re: Hypothetical: Could MULTICS have been written in C, if available?)

[Larry McVoy via TUHS]

On Wed, May 27, 2026 at 05:07:28PM -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
> *Yet*.  A bug in theory but not in practice *yet*. But this begs the
> question, why `assert` at all? The `assert` here is simply not
> correct.

The assert was there in case this ever turns into an actual bug.  I'm
sure there are 100s or 1000s of "bugs" like this, if nobody ever hits
it, why expend resources on a perceived problem?

> > If it had found any real bugs, we would have been pleased.  It did not.
> 
> See above. Bluntly, this sounds like hubris.

Not gonna engage any more deeply, I'm retired, especially from bike shed
arguments like this.

> That said, there is a tendency on this list to comment on the "caliber
> of many programmers today", and not in a good way. I would invite
> people who do that to perhaps take a moment to consider their
> preconceptions, and to reflect on whether things are really as
> different now as they were back then, and to the extent that they are,
> ask what has actually changed?

I base my comments on discussion I've had with a bright young kid who
worked on some tool that finds bugs in binaries.  It all sounded very
difficult to me.  When I asked wouldn't it be easier to hire people that
didn't create these bugs.  He insisted that programmers like that were
nowhere to found.
-- 
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Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat