> When it comes to the enjoyment of programming, I hate all of them. With a passion.
> Except for C.
I get the sense that this is the real reason, and the rest of it is justification that they understand the risks involved but choose to do it anyways. And honestly, I think this it's fine? I'd argue that it's a little inconsistent with their statement above that avoiding C/C++ in lieu of memory safe languages and should be followed by default, but they subsequently admit to being hypocritical about this, so I'm not really concerned that they don't understand the benefits of memory safety. When it comes down to it, I have middling confidence that I would be able convince someone who still at this point doubts that Rust is safer than C, but I have absolutely no illusions that I can convince someone to change a personal preference. If anything, it's a bit refreshing to see it freely admitted, given how often it seems to be the real reason for a lot of choices of what language to use (and I don't just mean this for C/C++, but for any language, including Rust).
I think he's fairly transparent that it is the only reason. "I program in C because I enjoy it even though I know objectively it is not a terribly good choice for building software" is pretty much the entire article.
> I’ve written code in so many languages:
[omitted list of a couple dozen languages]
> and many more.
> When it comes to the enjoyment of programming, I hate all of them. With a passion.
> Except for C.
I get the sense that this is the real reason, and the rest of it is justification that they understand the risks involved but choose to do it anyways. And honestly, I think this it's fine? I'd argue that it's a little inconsistent with their statement above that avoiding C/C++ in lieu of memory safe languages and should be followed by default, but they subsequently admit to being hypocritical about this, so I'm not really concerned that they don't understand the benefits of memory safety. When it comes down to it, I have middling confidence that I would be able convince someone who still at this point doubts that Rust is safer than C, but I have absolutely no illusions that I can convince someone to change a personal preference. If anything, it's a bit refreshing to see it freely admitted, given how often it seems to be the real reason for a lot of choices of what language to use (and I don't just mean this for C/C++, but for any language, including Rust).