There’s just a certain amount of effort that you can spend in a certain amount of time. And discipline takes effort. If you need less discipline you can spend your effort somewhere else. For instance you can put effort into fitting your code into an ownership model like in Rust or proof the code with Coq. The difference is that with C you can never know if there was enough discipline (usually there isn’t).
It’s my experience that discipline is “front-loaded.” It takes conscious effort for some time, while establishing a habit, then, it becomes pretty much “free.”
For example, when I was writing ObjC and PHP, I got used to using Whitesmiths indenting. Once I started writing Swift, it was more appropriate to use KNF style.
It took a couple of months of having to remember to not use the old indenting style, but I haven’t given indenting any thought in years.
”We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not act; but a habit.” -Attributed to Aristotle
