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Comment by harpiaharpyja | Hacker News Reader

I'm guessing you've never used Python for a serious project before, because your statement is incorrect. Aside from the fact that Python is memory safe, my experience has been that it is far easier to avoid logic errors in Python than in C/C++.

Equivalent Python code is shorter and less noisy than C/C++, and Python makes it easier to create succinct and simple to use abstractions. The result is that code is far easier to audit. Furthermore, my experience has been that it is much easier to create unit and integration tests in Python, which means that people actually do it and/or test more comprehensively.

My experience has been that if the performance cost of Python is no object then there is a correctness benefit over C/C++ for a disciplined programmer. I suggest you gain some more experience with both languages before making an offhand comparison.

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In my experience it's much harder to write Python that won't crash than C/C++ that won't crash. With Python, rarely taken code paths can have very dumb errors in them (e.g. accidentally introducing a new variable with a different name than the variable you wanted or typoing a method name, or passing arguments with the wrong type) that would get caught by a C/C++ compiler but won't be caught in Python until the crash happens some months later. Typically in "reliable" code you're not going to do much dynamic allocation anyway, at least past the initialization stage (because memory fragmentation!) so memory errors aren't that common anyway.

Yes, probably Rust and Ada provide even more guarantees...

C/C++ memory errors are literally responsible for 70% of ALL critical security bugs. Most python "dumb errors" can be caught by linters. Memory is infinitely harder.

Source -- https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/07/16/a-proactive-appro...

And Python is implemented as a large C program.

66% python, 32% C - for cpython.

94% python, 5% C - for pypy.

cpython is the reference implementation and 32% means about 350,000 lines of code. My point stands.

So is glasgow haskell compiler or ocaml compiler - so what?

The linter can't tell that the method doesn't exist until runtime, can it? If so, it wouldn't accept lots of valid python... Also, what linter should I use?

Either way, not all software needs to be secure to an adversary (since it's running behind several firewalls and if the attacker has shell access, then it's already game over).

> ...there is a correctness benefit over C/C++ for a disciplined programmer.

Businesses want cheap programmers, not disciplined programmers. It's a great utopia if everyone just follows the best practices and does it perfectly all the time, but I guarantee that as margins become thin people writing, say, code for autonomous vehicles are doing the _very_ minimum to meet correctness requirements.

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