> Which wasn't the point of that at all. It was to point out that you[r] assessment of how much time is wasted working around problems in each case is irrelevant given your vastly different experience levels.
That was almost my exact point, and it's odd you're repeating it back to me. I guess I could've laid it out more plainly.
> [Metaphors] Driving it into irrelevancy through focusing on minutiae is a useful rhetorical trick. [...] at the extreme end if done purposefully is not acting in good faith
Using a metaphor is a rhetorical trick. If you want to explain something to a non-technical audience, maybe analogies "get the hay down to the horses" so they can have at least a limited understanding. However, we both seem to understand programming languages so talking about roads obfuscates the discussion, leaving me to wonder whether there really is a parallel between the two topics. I know more about programming languages than I do about bike paths.
> Depending on the segfault? I could. It would take me a lot of work, because it's been nearly 15 years since I paid much attention to that, but I have done it before.
Even if I offer to run malicious data, it sounds to me like a low probability event - probably lower than my being in an airplane crash or shot by a cop. It's not something I should fear today. Over the last 25 years, I've had lots of segfaults, but I think I've done the most damage by accidentally overwriting files. I'm a little afraid of that.
> No, you don't optimize your life around them, but you might also support checking of identities on international flights to prevent access to your nation from known terrorists.
No, I definitely would not. It's very easy to get into this country, and an organized (dangerous) group would have no more difficulty than the drug dealers do smuggling cocaine. There is no benefit to harassing millions of citizens if you can't actually stop the problem.
> Here's the thing. It's not about you.
Are you suggesting the only people allowed to share their experiences in a thread like this are new programmers and the people pushing their language? I was new once, and I survived lots and lots of segfaults. Don't you think neophytes should hear that? They're definitely getting a large dose of doom and gloom about the bad old days.
> Some percentage of C and C++ programmers are neophytes. [...] I think that reducing this has such a large impact, that this is of vast benefit to society at large (given the botnets we are currently seeing), and would total billions of dollars.
In one of your other comments, you indicated you haven't tried Rust yet. You should - you sound interested. It definitely has its nice parts. However, I don't think you will find the safety features to be a big productivity gain, and you will have to use unsafe code to accomplish tasks from a freshman level computer science book. Think about that - you can't cleanly use the safe subset of Rust to teach computer science to beginners... (you could do it with a lot of compromises)