Reply to post:

If you have a program written by someone who can't count, index an array or stay within memory bounds, then the language really isn't the problem.

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth.

These are extremely common problems and if you are trying to imply that no-one should employ a programmer that has or can fall victim to such a mistake then you're going to severely limit the pool of potential employees. Given that the world has a long-standing shortage of programmers of all abilities that doesn't bode well.

I'd also suggest that if you're attitude to a problem is 'we shouldn't employ stupid people' then you have a management problem. When you write code I /assume/ you include safeguards. Code that detects when things are not right and that acts to protect the system. Well that's what managed languages are doing.

And they are doing it more cheaply. There's a maxim in software development (all forms of engineering probably) that the sooner you catch an error the cheaper it is to fix it. Well you write code to detect and guard against out of range errors. Good. But some of us are using languages that don't let us (or discourage us) from making such mistakes in the first place. That's better because it's cheaper not to make a mistake than to detect and correct it.

More usually, you then see things like huge memory over-use because they just want everything in a memory-safe object permanently in memory all the time and let the computer worry about when to get rid of it (if it ever safely can!). I'm pretty sure that explains a lot of the "drag" of the memory-safe languages - a complete lack of understanding of the memory size/usage/management.

Memory is cheap and modern OSes page to disk anyway. For most applications the fact that a program would eventually die from memory mismanagement after a week is unimportant. Most applications rarely run longer than the working day anyway. And if developed with a managed language if the application crashes..meh. The users swears cracks a joke with their colleague and starts it up again. No real harm done.

Most applications don't have to be particularly robust, nor particular performant. They just have to not corrupt themselves or increase security risks to the system. Writing all software to the kinds of standards you advocate would cripple the industry. There aren't enough programmers of a high enough calibre so you'd just slow down the pace of innovation to a crawl.