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Comment by tialaramex | Hacker News Reader

It's a deliberate echo of the famous Onion headline about America's absolutely disgraceful pretence that it couldn't do anything about all the shootings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...

> If someone has a choice, a safer more modern language can accommodate less skilled practitioners.

This is the usual mistake. It's not a "skill issue". Footguns are a design mistake, they're much more dangerous than necessary hence the name. As a result the practitioners accomodated by a better language are all those capable of mistake ie all humans.

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Rather like the school shooting issue, the C issue is bound up with people at the identity level; they insist on the danger because they cannot stand the possibility of the danger being taken away from them. Their ability to use guns or C safely must not be questioned. They percieve it as an insult to take that choice away from them. They are the safe C programmer that never ships a CVE. They know that they themselves would never shoot up a school, so what the problem? Oh it's bad people. Well, that's happening somewhere else to other people, so it's fine and they can carry on.

(edit: someone was helpful to provide an example in this thread; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40438716 )

Here's an attempt to explaining the irrational part of programmers deciding which programming language to use. Part of it goes into more detail on ideas like C programmers insisting 'on the danger because they cannot stand the possibility of the danger being taken away from them'.

"The Pervert's Guide to Computer Programming Languages" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZyvIHYn2zk

It's pretty out there, but I thought also interesting.

Congratulations, you just landed in my very small number of favorite comments.

One can in fact not do anything about something for which one refuse to even consider the root causes of.

In the case of shootings, one must talk about what may have caused shootings to start noticeably increasing in around the 1970s, to the point where a single year started having as many shootings as all the shootings prior to the 20th century combined.

Fun fact; the first documented school shooting was perpetrated by some Lenape indigenous people, in Pennsylvania in 1764, during which attack they also beat to death all of the students and scalped everyone.

> Fun fact; the first documented school shooting was perpetrated by some Lenape indigenous people, in Pennsylvania in 1764, during which attack they also beat to death all of the students and scalped everyone

That would probably count under modern definitions of "terrorism". I would also say that most school shootings should also be counted as "terrorism", except there's a very strong ideological push to not look at them this way. Don't look at the radicalisation. Don't read the (suspiciously similar) manifestoes. Don't look at who they cite for inspiration.

If you're going to go back there far, before it was independent, I bet there was something documented in medieval Oxford or Cambridge involving a longbow and/or an anelas.

[Also writing "skill issue" caused me to immediately think of Gill Issue, the Grand Poo World 3 course with a name that's a pun on skill issue, so for anybody else whose brain works the same way, here's somebody competent beating Gill Issue: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/I6PdLgUGHaw ]

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