That still doesn't point out the emotion in the comment. Your reply here would work as a reply to the root comment, but doesn't address what I am asking at all. Where is the passion?
Asbestos is an emotionally charged topic for many people, especially the many who have (primarily) older relatives who have died or are dying from cancers caused by it. The analogy is resting primarily on the appeal to that kind of emotion without actually establishing a strong logical similarity between C and asbestos.
> Asbestos is an emotionally charged topic for many people, especially the many who have (primarily) older relatives who have died or are dying from cancers caused by it.
I’ve not personally been impacted by this, but this seems reasonable.
> The analogy is resting primarily on the appeal to that kind of emotion
This seems like projection. It struck me as a perfectly legitimate analogy without any emotional correlation.
I don't know, C isn't out there causing cancer and killing people left and right. It's hyperbolic to draw that comparison. Critical systems (especially post Therac-25) that are using C are already using a subset of C, static analysis tools, and comprehensive testing that raise the quality level of actual life-and-health-impacting C programs.
EDIT: Because someone will probably make a note of it: Therac-25 wasn't written in C, but the flaws in that system and others helped lead to a massive change in the way critical systems are developed and treated. I referenced it because it's one of the most notable failures in safety-critical software systems.
It’s fine to argue that the analogy is flawed (all of them are) or that it’s irrelevant, or simply wrong.
What this entire thread is about, however, is this highly charged response to what seemed like a straightforward analogy.
> Frankly getting your knickers in a knot is emotional - the people using C are doing so for pragmatic reasons, not emotion.
> I do see comments like yours a lot - there's an emotional attachment and/or ego attached to the comment, so the argument against is very vociferous and, honestly, ugly[1].
At the end of the day it seems as though an emotional argument occurred in the eye of the beholder. This only adds even more credibility to the root comment.
A failed experiment with the Socratic method on my part.
Where does this argument end? Are we banned from using analogies containing animals because someone out there has a relative who died from a bear/shark/bee sting? Are we banned from talking about cows in a debate with vegans because someone lost a loved one when they were out hiking and got caught up in a cattle stampede? Are we banned from mentioning cars because everyone knows someone who had a traumatic car injury? By this logic you either end up molly coddling the entire world into silence because everything is a possible traumatic trigger to somebody or you declare yourself the king of acceptable debate and only the topics you approve of are acceptable because you are the chosen one anointed by the heavens.
It’s a classic reductio ad absurdum which is bizarre by nature. It shows that silencing people for discussing things you personally find upsetting is a slippery slope that leads to absurd or undesirable endpoints.
Also point out that there is nothing that can be done to fix asbestos. But C can be made safer. The three things that block that are
1 A culture that thinks API's need to always have a gotcha. See the inability to to field a safe string copy.
2 ISO commitee that thinks it's in charge of maintaining a historical artifact. Suggestions to change the language like Brights suggestions about passing arrays fail because the ISO committee thinks that's Heresy.
3 People that think C is hopeless. Usually these are people that had a bad time with it in school.
4 Idiots that think the only reason to use C is speed. Therefor any improved way of doing things that might be 10-20% slower than raw unsafe code is pointless.
