And yet here we stand, still not having it replaced at scale.
To quote Hoare in 1980,
"A consequence of this principle is that every occurrence of every subscript of every subscripted variable 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."
===> I note with fear and horror that even in 1980 language designers and users have not learned this lesson.
Referring naturally to C, by the way 1988 is the birth year of the Morris Worm, taking advantage of C's buffer management capabilities.
Yes, a pretty low bar that 40 years after those events is still largely used across the industry.
And the copy paste compatibility of Objective-C and C++ with C doesn't help, because even though those languages provide better capabilities and safer alternatives than writing raw C, there are always those folks that will write C style code no matter what.
> And yet here we stand, still not having it replaced at scale.
Network effects and business' risk aversion.
Nothing to do with technical superiority / inferiority really. The MBAs only hear "we must replace everything from scratch" and immediately shout "NO!".
Offensively simple I am afraid. That's all there is to it.
Believe me, I'd jump with joy if we scrap like 75% of all UNIX crap, especially "untyped text rulz" in the terminal -- and introduce one good terminal protocol in the process. But it ain't happening in yours and my lifetime.
