White House urges developers to dump C and C++

They’re definitely not seen as an authority in this field. Why would anyone care what recommendation they make?

It's possible that they are acting on the advice of advisors who are authorities in this field.

And so why make one at all?

I expect it's because information and industrial security are components of national security, which is of great concern to them, and those things depend on software.

I'm not surprised to see this, given that state-sponsored electronic attacks are on the rise these days.

It’s a national security threat

NIST are the experts guiding the White House.

There have been words around this, like how software should be safe by design, but the regulation should come from the governing entity. This is simply materialized now, but there has been momentum.

They can't even figure out language for human interpretation much less computer interpretation.

Done, next the Linux kernel? 😱

Maybe you can use Team COBOL's wheelchairs as walkers?

I updated an internal library from 77 to 90 last week. We're working quickly these days!

well... that's the point - if they weren't this wouldn't be a concern

Damn, it’s been like 25 years since I touched either of those. Aside from OS development, do people really do that anymore?

Republicans get C, Java, Lua, and C++; Democrats get Ada, Rust, C#, and Python; Libertarians get Zig, TCL, Julia, and Ocaml for some reason.

Can I both upvote and downvote you? Seems most appropriate

C isn't bad. It has been a good portable assembly language for ages, and remains so today. What's problematic is continuing to use it where more advanced languages now make more sense.

I won't defend C++, though. I'm happy to kick it to the curb now that better alternatives are gaining traction.

Such as? (Non-programmer here, so I don't know the ins and outs of programming languages.)

Just write memory safe code lol

While this is technically correct, it's tantamount to saying "just don't make mistakes", or arguing that a seatbelt is unnecessary because many are good enough drivers to not need it.

Languages like C and C++ do not prohibit the kinds of mistakes that the NSA told us two years ago lead to software vulnerabilities.

Other languages, like Rust, have higher guardrails built in and make it much more difficult to accidentally create the same failure modes.

I love C, but C definitely is the problem.

While one disciplined programmer can in theory write correct code, once there is a small group of even good C programmers and a code base with more than around 3000-5000 LOC, there will be bugs. There is a good reason for tools like Valgrind etc.

While I think C and C++ are the problem, I don't think Rust is the solution, tho.

It is just too easy to shoot yourself in the foot when using a foot gun... Sure the experts can avoid it, but that doesn't mean the foot gun is a good tool in general.

Your take is objectively false. This issue has been studied and the conclusion every time is that real programmers make memory-related mistakes all the time. Even if there are a few superhuman programmers who never get tired, have a bad day, or misunderstand an API, firing the 99.99% of programmers who aren't superheroes isn't a realistic solution to anything.

If you're an expert tightrope walker, you're likely not gonna fall off. You can just do it without too much issue. When you're doing it over a chasm, and you don't plan on dying, you'd still probably prefer a harness though, wouldn't you?

Edit: I'm not saying C is a bad language or anything, but for important applications the safety of actually memory safe languages is vital for lower-skilled programmers and still a good assistance for higher-skilled programmers, as we're all humans and it doesn't hurt to try and avoid the mistakes we will eventually make.