It may not be stressful for you, but it ends up being stressful for anyone who has to rely on the resulting programs. When they have a security issue due to a buffer overflow, or a crash due to a null pointer error, etc.
The "just trust me bro" school of programming is not suitable for delivering serious systems.
if you can't write code without buffer overflows, how are you going to write code that is accurate on any of a number of other dimensions? You need to do things the right number of times, if you don't, you get the wrong answer. I agree that security vulns are bad bad, but correctness is also a good thing, and getting things right is not a "nice to have" skill.
> The idea that it's impossible to write good, solid programs in any given language is ridiculous.
The data disagrees. There's plenty of evidence that the severity of bugs and the number and severity of security bugs is far higher in languages like C or C++ than in memory-safe languages.
> Only if you're writing bad programs.
This is precisely the "just trust me bro" mentality I was referring to.
"I write good programs, I swear!"
But you're human, and you really don't. You make mistakes. Empirically, you make roughly as many mistakes per line as
programmers in other languages, but the consequences of those mistakes are worse.
You can argue with me all you want, but you're essentially arguing with reality. C has survived for legacy reasons, but almost everyone is desperate for a better, more robust alternative.
Just so you know where I'm coming from - I learned C in the early 80s, not long after learning Fortran. I later started using C++ because it seemed to offer some benefits. But now - more than forty years later, when there are so many better alternatives for any given problem except one which requires legacy integration - it's astonishing to me that people are still staunchly defending C.
It reminds me of what Max Planck said about physics:
> “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
The "just trust me bro" school of programming is not suitable for delivering serious systems.