Re: C and C-style C++
Certainly software standards are low compared to "real" engineering disciplines like civil engineering. So yes, people do need to know what they are doing and pay attention.
But the days of being able to keep the entire state of the machine in your head as you program, which was something that you could do back in the day, have long since gone. It's not you, a 68k, 16 registers and a bit o' RAM. It's two, or four sockets each with a variable number of cores, maybe with hyperthreading, maybe with memory access crossing a QPI, god knows how many registers, maybe the whole thing is virtualized, the clock can go slow, fast, stop for days and then wake up, I mean the complexity is astounding. I don't believe that any systems programmer can place their hand on their heart and predict zero % chance of a stray memory access or timing bug in that environment.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
