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Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

It reminds me of the days I was reading Knuth's quote "97% of the time premature optimisation blabla" every time someone was trying to make something faster.

CPUs are not getting faster, yet it seems using tools that makes things run faster are somehow taboo.

Wirth's law:

Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.

Why is java taught in university, and why is this language considered like some kind of standard? Most OSes are written in C, yet most of silicon valley frowns upon writing C because of arrays. Even C++ is getting a bad reputation.

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Think most companies resist using lower level languages due to their ultimate purpose being to build products that provide value and sell them. They are generally far less concerned with the technical details and conciseness of the implementations. "Good enough" is a very squishy term but for most companies, for better or for worse, that bar is pretty low. There are plenty of industries that focus on lower level langs and use them pretty well but it's not the norm for big corporations who value rapid turn around over all other factors.

> frowns upon writing C because of arrays

Do you mean horrifying security flaws?

You're right, but you cannot accuse the entire language of being insecure, ultimately it's the responsibility of the developer.

Also you can't always say we don't use C only for security reasons, as other languages also have their security issues. There are many modern ways to avoid those flaws. Like someone answered, it boils down to a matter of development cost.

I'm also quite skeptical when people always rise the objection of security when writing software. Security is not so simple, and so far it's its own specialty, and pretending that it's worth it to make things slower and that the security gain is actually there, is not really completely accurate.

Security is almost a post 9/11 paranoia knee jerk reaction.

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