There is a discussion about the security of applications written in C on Hacker News recently after the report of HeartBleed bug in OpenSSL. In this discussion, some people are saying that the applications written in C are unsafe. It seems all or most of the faults should be laid on C. I think this is biased. The language itself should not be blamed.Safety is a relative term for programming languages. No language is absolutely safe. We claim some languages like Java and C# are safer than C/C++ because they have memory protection mechanism built in, we cannot access arbitrary memory locations i...

There's an old adage that goes something like: 'Do not talk about religion or politics'.  Why?  Because these subjects are full of strong opinions but are thin on objective answers.   One person's certainty is another person's skepticism; someone else's common sense just appears as an a prior bias to those who see matters differently.  Sadly,  conversing these controversial subjects can generate more heat than light.   All too often people can get so wound up that they forget that the outcome of their "discussion" has no bearing on their life expectancy,...