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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

> A great deal of this article is about C being a "cancer", "a perpetually unsafe development ecosystem", whose cancerous properties are enabled by the absolute horror of it being portable.

Author here: my sibling already explained the language, but I specifically chose "cancer" because I remember seeing the UNIX-haters handbook use that phrase (I'm not exactly a UNIX hater, but it's always stuck with me). I write C and C++ professionally (and I like it that way!), and I think it's perfectly fair and accurate to refer to their spread as cancerous.

> The implied replacement is Rust.

No. Rust was an example. The replacement is any memory-safe language; Rust just happens to have done a great job getting much of the tooling right from the get-go.

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That is not a good reason for choosing such charged language. You can get your point across without comparing a venerable (if flawed) programming language to one of the most feared class of diseases that kills millions each year.

I think there are good points you make that people should hear, but less people will listen if you turn them away by making grotesque comparisons.

> You can get your point across without comparing a venerable (if flawed) programming language to one of the most feared class of diseases that kills millions each year.

I'm going to be pedantic with this: calling something "a cancer" is not comparing it to cancer. The phrase "X is a cancer" is bombastic and inflammatory, which is intentional. It's neither a simile nor grotesque, at least in my dialect of English.

As for the actual point: I see no reason to venerate C. Nobody should labor under the false pretense that we, as an industry, are brilliant enough to reliably write safe, cross-platform C. We haven't managed to do it for the last 50 years and, given the current state of static analysis on C, I don't have any particular hope for the next 50. I'm going to keep on writing it, but I don't intend to venerate it or convey that expectation on anyone else.

> As for the actual point: I see no reason to venerate C. Nobody should labor under the false pretense that we, as an industry, are brilliant enough to reliably write safe, cross-platform C. We haven't managed to do it for the last 50 years and, given the current state of static analysis on C, I don't have any particular hope for the next 50. I'm going to keep on writing it, but I don't intend to venerate it or convey that expectation on anyone else.

This absolutely hits the nail on the head. This is masterfully put.

The problem with a great many successful things in the world is there's a very human tendency to "saint" them and attribute a sort of mystical infallibility/ineffability to them. As though they weren't just "fit for the purpose and in the right place at the right time", but rather "a work of genius - the right solution for all time, now and forever." (C.f "end-of-history-fallacy").

That's how technology stagnates - if we, as a community, can't admit something's got room for improvement, it simply won't.

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