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> where safe options would have worked fine Thats a very short-sighted view IMO, software engineering is not just about technology choices.

kiratp 3y ago
Software engineering is first and foremost about making good engineering choices. We are proving time and again as an industry that humans CANNOT write mistake-free code. From just this week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37600852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37600852 Just because someone built a fantastically functional building doesn't mean we can't criticize their choice of foundation. Case in point: Millennium Tower in SF: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/series/millennium-tower/san-francisco-millennium-tower-more-tilting/3249034/ https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/series/millennium-...
- kgeist 3y ago
  Clickhouse is a Yandex project and at Yandex, they historically use C++ for almost everything, I guess it's part of their culture (probably the founders were C++ programmers?) Their web services such as Yandex Taxi's backend (Uber's equivalent) are also written in C++ which is unusual for webdev nowadays.
  - tylerhannan 3y ago
    s/is a/was a/g But more interesting, to me, is language adoption and familiarity by region. I have a bookmarked dev.to article from 2020 that discussed programming language popularity by state - https://dev.to/eduecosystem/what-is-the-most-popular-programming-language-in-each-us-state-ha https://dev.to/eduecosystem/what-is-the-most-popular-program... I'm uncertain if anyone has extrapolated that to more geographic regions. It would be interesting.
- krvajal 3y ago
  And when making those engineering choices there are different tradeoffs and constraints to be considered. The language to use is one of them. So when a Rust (wild guess) fanboy comes without any background context and makes comments like yours is very telling. You are correct that bug free software does not exist. But choose a “memory safe” language does not prevent that. A seasoned C++ developer knows how to use memory sanitizers and other tools to guarantee the correctness of its code compared to an average Rust developer that just trust the compiler which, guess what, also may have bugs.

kiratp 3y ago

Software engineering is first and foremost about making good engineering choices. We are proving time and again as an industry that humans CANNOT write mistake-free code. From just this week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37600852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37600852 Just because someone built a fantastically functional building doesn't mean we can't criticize their choice of foundation. Case in point: Millennium Tower in SF: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/series/millennium-tower/san-francisco-millennium-tower-more-tilting/3249034/ https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/series/millennium-...

kgeist 3y ago
Clickhouse is a Yandex project and at Yandex, they historically use C++ for almost everything, I guess it's part of their culture (probably the founders were C++ programmers?) Their web services such as Yandex Taxi's backend (Uber's equivalent) are also written in C++ which is unusual for webdev nowadays.
- tylerhannan 3y ago
  s/is a/was a/g But more interesting, to me, is language adoption and familiarity by region. I have a bookmarked dev.to article from 2020 that discussed programming language popularity by state - https://dev.to/eduecosystem/what-is-the-most-popular-programming-language-in-each-us-state-ha https://dev.to/eduecosystem/what-is-the-most-popular-program... I'm uncertain if anyone has extrapolated that to more geographic regions. It would be interesting.
krvajal 3y ago
And when making those engineering choices there are different tradeoffs and constraints to be considered. The language to use is one of them. So when a Rust (wild guess) fanboy comes without any background context and makes comments like yours is very telling. You are correct that bug free software does not exist. But choose a “memory safe” language does not prevent that. A seasoned C++ developer knows how to use memory sanitizers and other tools to guarantee the correctness of its code compared to an average Rust developer that just trust the compiler which, guess what, also may have bugs.