On 5/17/17 8:27 PM, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
On Wed, May 17, 2017 at 04:16:59PM -0700, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d wrote:
On 5/17/2017 1:46 PM, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
People aren't willing to accept that their cherished choice of
language may have been the wrong one, especially if they have
invested much of their lives in mastering said language.
It may not be the developers that initiate this change. It'll be the
managers and the customers who force the issue - as those are the
people who'll pay the bill for the problems.
That may or may not force a shift to a different language. In fact, the
odds are heavily stacked against a language change. Most management are
concerned (and in many cases, rightly so) about the cost of rewriting
decades-old "proven" software as opposed to merely plugging the holes in
the existing software. As long as they have enough coders plugging away
at the bugs, they're likely to be inclined to say "good enough".
What will cause a shift is a continuous business loss.
If business A and B are competing in the same space, and business A has
a larger market share, but experiences a customer data breach. Business
B consumes many of A's customers, takes over the market, and it turns
out that the reason B wasn't affected was that they used a memory-safe
language.
The business cases like this will continue to pile up until it will be
considered ignorant to use a non-memory safe language. It will be even
more obvious when companies like B are much smaller and less funded than
companies like A, but can still overtake them because of the advantage.
At least, this is the only way I can see C ever "dying". And of course
by dying, I mean that it just won't be selected for large startup
projects. It will always live on in low level libraries, and large
existing projects (e.g. Linux).
I wonder how much something like D in betterC mode can take over some of
these tasks?
-Steve
