Comment by 29athrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 29athrowaway | Hacker News Reader

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There are bad ideas with known consequences. We know what happens if you aim at your foot with a shotgun and then fire, for example.

Unless you are doing something obscure like testing shotgun-proof footwear, it is a good idea to have an automated system tell you: "ERROR: You are shooting your foot, do not aim at your foot with a shotgun and fire on line 123".

The C and C++ philosophy starts with the premise "programmers know best and will never aim a shotgun at their foot and then fire, that makes no sense haha, why are you talking to me about that? you are silly!". Yet, there are millions of people getting shot in the foot every year and it took a new language to demonstrate that the entire class of nonsense can be prevented.

> The C and C++ philosophy starts with the premise "programmers know best and will never aim a shotgun at their foot and then fire

That's absolutely not the C/C++ philosophy. The C philosophy (I lost track of whatever the C++ philosophy is supposed to be several versions back) is that it's a mid-level language and lets you have pretty low-level access to the machine. With that comes the need for great caution, much like working in assembly.

It's not premised on the idea that programmers are infallible at all, but on the idea that code-checking and correctness is to be done through process rather than the language itself.

It isn't what is explicitly touted as standard, but it is what many developers have culturally established.

>That's absolutely not the C/C++ philosophy

while it is not explicitly written out like this anymore, the standard charter used to say

> Trust the programmer.

> Don't prevent the programmer from doing what needs to be done.

for 30 something years, which sounds similar to what the other poster said.

The current charter[1] only says "Allow programming freedom" which I'd still interpret to mean something similar.

1: https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n3280.htm

(edited due to formatting messups)

Some freedom is productive, some freedom is not.

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