Quote from: grau on December 24, 2014, 10:02:10 AM

Quote from: Peter Todd on December 24, 2014, 07:37:19 AM

It's no surprise that easier languages attract even less skilled programmers who make more mistakes, but it's foolish to think that giving skilled programmers a tool other than a footgun is going to result in more mistakes. I think the unfortunate thing - maybe the root cause of this problem in the industry - is you definitely do need to teach programmers C at some point in their education so they understand how computers actually work. For that matter we need to teach them assembler too. The problem is C is nice enough to actually use - even the nicest machine architectures aren't - and people trained that way tend to reach for that footgun over and over again in the rest of their careers when really the language should be put on a shelf and only brought out to solve highly specialized tasks - just like assembler.

"Easy" applies to e.g. Python, but is unlikely the motivation for those who turn to Haskell or Scala. It is rather skilled programmers who turn to functional languages after they shot into their foot enough to reconsider what they stand on.

Quote from: Peter Todd on December 24, 2014, 07:37:19 AM

Equally, how many computer science graduates finish their education with a good understanding of the fact that a programing language is fundamentally a user interface layer between them and machine code?

Unfortunatelly many of those who get that think that they are better than the compiler and its runtime. Some might be really better, maybe even consistently, but staying ahead of compiler and runtime development is getting harder and their advantage less and less likely.

Couldn't have said this better myself.