Looks like the US government wants to fix all our problems for us... brought to you by the same guy who thinks firing your shotgun thru the door at a unknown and unknowable threat is the best home defense.

https://www.infoworld.com/article/3713203/white-house-urges-developers-to-dump-c-and-c.html

oh, and the other one, old news:
https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/02/28/biden-advises-shooting-shotgun-through-door

Just revert back to Dartmouth Basic before it all Rusts away...

But isn't part of the problem that the training of c/c++ programmers is inadequate and needs to be improved?

Which problem :)

The logic ... is effectively.. most of the security problems are buffer overflows, and C/C++ are vulnerable to that, so lets ban it.
Which to me reads like this:
"the majority of fatalities for people under age 10 are caused by vehicles" so "it is now recommended that no one under 10 ride in a vehicle". Ok so you do that, everyone is inconvenienced mightily, but somehow we do it. And 5 years later... "the majority of fatalities for people under the age of 10 is now pedestrian struck by vehicle" ...

There will always be a #1 top cause of problems. Banning something to fix it just kicks the can down the road, esp when using old data to talk about the problems, as most buffer overrun problems are now detectable and fixable at development time in any language.

It feels like microsoft's 'its not ours, fight it' hate against c++ that has been ongoing since before they tried to hijack java.

MS has a history of trying to have an in-house programming language become a dominant force across platforms. Visual Basic was one, C# another.

I am not dissin' (much) either language, they both have their niche uses. Especially VB. Neither really works outside of the Windows environment AFAIK even though VS does do cross-platform apps. I don't have any need for either.

When the US government steps in, though, that mandate is being done by people who are less tech savvy than my cat.

Personally if I were to start learning to program for MacOS or 'nix I'd have a 'puter with that OS and use the native tools instead of MS cross-platform voodoo. C/C++ has the advantage of the same code without changes theoretically should compile no matter what the OS.

</rant>

seeplus wrote:
Just revert back to Dartmouth Basic before it all Rusts away...

Heh™. Nice bit of desert dry wit there.

yea it bothers me because the govt hires a LOT of software contractors. Many of them are free to use any language that suits the task; we always were allowed that luxury 20 years back. But at times its dictated, and this may be an unofficial policy or other aggravation coming down from on-high from know-nothings.
If its just hot air, I can live with it ... don't like it, but we get plenty of that every day on every topic.


C# is actually pretty good. The problem I have with it is that instead of letting it sell itself, which it is more than capable of doing, they push it harder than a used car salesman. That and its facepalm name.

Governments are always trying to remove the innate ability of programmers to create bugs in code. This goes back to Ada from the early 1980's which was developed to be the sole programming language for the United States Department of Defence. Ada is still around (latest version is Ada 2022) and has an international standard ISO/IEC 8652:2023. So why is the White House not promoting Ada in support of its own DoD? Why is Ada not now the predominant programming language?

"It has built-in language support for design by contract (DbC), extremely strong typing, explicit concurrency, tasks, synchronous message passing, protected objects, and non-determinism. Ada improves code safety and maintainability by using the compiler to find errors in favour of runtime errors."

What's not to want?