Anecdote: Back in my days at Boeing
I was going to say that this could never happen, code reviews etc etc... And then I remembered my days working adjacent to the aircraft industry, and I thought; Yes, this could totally have happened.
They're safer now, so that's good.
Car manufacturers want the part to be available for 20 years.
Finally someone who understands how the industry works.
secondly: the electronics in vehicles is incredibly simple, usually handling very large current.
Everything you wrote is correct, apart from this bit. Modern cars, for better or for worse, contain very complex electronics, multiple ECMs, large networks - Ethernet as well as CAN. Some of it handles large current, for sure, but a lot of it doesn't.
involved buying reject parts at bargain prices on the theory they'd work at the levels home users wanted.
Which is, of course, a clever idea.
I don't think I would have. It's no exaggeration to say that the ZX81 my parents bought me when I was like seven years old completely changed my life.
Later on, once it became apparent that the 1kb of RAM wasn't enough, they got me a ZX spectrum. And later still, an Amstrad CPC 6128. I'm not alone. That original computer, and Clive Sinclair's designs, changed a generation of kids lives just like mine.
C is supremely tedious without necessarily providing benefit for it.
Very well put. It sure builds fast though.
An array index out of bounds is not something the language can detect in C or C++,
Partly correct, but missing the point. If you're actually writing C++, instead of just throwing your C code into a class, you won't be using an "array". The standard library comes with good number of excellent data structures, and you'll be using one of those instead. If you do actually need an array, you'll use a vector. A vector will throw if you access if out of bounds using ".at". You will also design your program so you're not using integer indexes into containers unless you absolutely have to.
but safe containers can be done and are available in C as well.
If you define "safe" as "still crashing the program if you do it wrong", then yes. They can be made safe. But in C++ they can throw an exception, which you can catch at a higher level, and generate some helpful output. If your program crashes, anywhere, ever, then it is probably exploitable.
Also, since when do C++ code come with a standard, always present way to log errors to a file? It does not.
The de-facto standard for logging output exists in C, C++, and any other language that runs on a unix system - I assume we're talking mostly about unix here. It's called "standard output" and "standard error". It will go to a file if you run your process as a service, otherwise it will go to the console. That should be good enough for anybody.
You're supposed to test all cases,
Well, yes, but it's impossible to do that even for relatively simple software
Thats the very definition of engineering.
Yes, it is. But there's no such thing as software "engineering" unless you're using MISRA-C and building safety-of-life systems. Do that, and you'll see some engineering. A bunch of hackers around the world throwing code into the Linux kernel meets no definition of engineering that I've ever seen.
...but aren't all the other languages pretty much written in C, or C++? I mean, sure, it's more complex than that. But I thought the Java, Javascript, Ruby, Lua, C#, Python etc etc runtimes are written in either C or C++.
I know some others can compile themselves, maybe Go can, and D and stuff. Maybe Swift? But I think most are just written as a front end to clang, which is written in C++.
C and C++ will outlive all of them.
That's kind of an irrelevant point though. Of course there was somebody living in that part of the world, at that time, called Jesus. It was a fairly common name.
The only thing that was interesting about the existence of this person, was the things that were written about him later on. Among these things, were statements around his alleged divine parentage. So the "historical Jesus" is not separate from the idea of the "Son of God".
If you are taking it more than even once every few months you are taking MDMA too much.
Says you. Once every few weeks is fine.
It makes you *think* you feel empathy!
Empathy is a feeling. So it makes you think you have a feeling, but you're not really having it? What's the difference?
Ascension remains one of the best Sci-Fi TV series I ever saw. In some ways, another season would have been great - but in another way I feel like the story was told enough.
I wouldn't dream of posting a spoiler here, but when the person did the thing and went to the place at the end, I felt the story was wrapped up pretty nicely. Sure, subsequent to that point, things could have continued to happen. But they would have been part of another story, set in the same universe.
Hey. Everyone. Watch Ascension.
Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. -- Henry David Thoreau
