Your reply doesn't point out the passionate component of it either, and doesn't answer my question.
Yes, you're missing the logic.
> Excluding the assumption that C is unsafe, it contains purely facts.
You think C is carcinogenic and mere exposure to it kills?
From a "purely facts" PoV, leaving all emotion aside, C runs, and has done so for a number of decades, life-critical systems, including munitions, weapons, life-support, industrial machinery and aviation.
It's only because you are married to your argument that you think comparing C to a fatal poison is "pure facts".
I don’t think there was any suggestion made that C is detrimental to human health.
I’ve not personally been impacted by this, but this seems reasonable.
> The analogy is resting primarily on the appeal to that kind of emotion
This seems like projection. It struck me as a perfectly legitimate analogy without any emotional correlation.
EDIT: Because someone will probably make a note of it: Therac-25 wasn't written in C, but the flaws in that system and others helped lead to a massive change in the way critical systems are developed and treated. I referenced it because it's one of the most notable failures in safety-critical software systems.
What this entire thread is about, however, is this highly charged response to what seemed like a straightforward analogy.
> Frankly getting your knickers in a knot is emotional - the people using C are doing so for pragmatic reasons, not emotion. > I do see comments like yours a lot - there's an emotional attachment and/or ego attached to the comment, so the argument against is very vociferous and, honestly, ugly[1].
A failed experiment with the Socratic method on my part.
1 A culture that thinks API's need to always have a gotcha. See the inability to to field a safe string copy.
2 ISO commitee that thinks it's in charge of maintaining a historical artifact. Suggestions to change the language like Brights suggestions about passing arrays fail because the ISO committee thinks that's Heresy.
3 People that think C is hopeless. Usually these are people that had a bad time with it in school.
4 Idiots that think the only reason to use C is speed. Therefor any improved way of doing things that might be 10-20% slower than raw unsafe code is pointless.
In this particular case, the argument is that C should be replaced with something safer for similar reasons that asbestos is replaced with something safer. However, one can certainly challenge the validity of this comparison and whether there's something faulty in it.
I don't feel one way or the other because I don't work with C or other low-level languages, but it's a bit absurd to say that an analogy isn't an argument. It absolutely can be if the argument within is clear, even if fallacious.
More often than not I see analogies (ab)used as a tool to construct a straw man. This particular case demonstrates how analogy takes discussion away from merits and downsides of C to an emotionally charged subject of cancerogenic substances, as other commenters highlighted in this thread.
It seemed like just a simple, general, easily-mappable analogy that most people would get, even non-programmer laymen, that emphasizes that unsafe should be replaced with safe. Any analogy of something unsafe can be seen as "emotionally charged" if someone was personally impacted by it.
Just for sake of clarity, formal analogy is a valid, non-fallacious argument because it's based on parity of reasoning.
The original comment made a pretty good, arguably formal analogy between asbestos and C. The only way to dismiss the conclusion is if there were no alternative to asbestos, then you're kinda forced to use asbestos. This is the case for C in some contexts, like some microcontrollers that only come with C compilers. It's not generally true that we need C for much else though.
"An analogical argument is an explicit representation of a form of analogical reasoning that cites accepted similarities between two systems to support the conclusion that some further similarity exists." [1]