lysdexic

I think this can be explained by underlining the differences between could, would, and should.

The blog states the fact that at least some C compilers already offer the necessary and sufficient tools that characterize "memory-safe" languages, and proceeds to illustrate examples. This isn't new. However, just like "memory-safe" languages enforce narrow coding styles through a happy path that is expected to prevent the introduction of some classes of vulnerabilities, leveraging these compiler features in C projects also requires the same type of approach.

This isn't new or unheard of. Some C++ frameworks are also known for supporting their own memory management and object ownership strategies, but you need to voluntarily adhere to them.

C++ can be written to be safe. I don’t think WH is the right authority to issue this warning. Naming C++ rather than going after specific features is unfair.

I suspect that the white house just received a report from some people in the industry stating that faulty software is vulnerable to attacks from bad actors, and from that basis they just went the simplistic path of arguing that 1) lots of software is written in C++, 2) that software has bugs, therefore if we don't use C++ then we won't have bugs.

As a branch of government, their role is not to evaluate technical merits of proposals but to hear what their representatives have to say.

Walter Bright has fairly odious political opinions;

I fail to see the relevance of what personal opinions and beliefs he may or may not have. You're making it sound like the goal is not to improve a language ir fix issues, but to take something away from a person just because you disagree with their political opinions. That's hardly good use of anyone's time, and sounds terribly petty behavior.

I wish I had that much free time to be able to waste it being so vindictive about such trifling issues.

Which languages have you invested/migrated to, only to find that “political stunts” had a “negative impact” on your planned development?

I don't waste my time with meaningless irrelevant stuff. Either a tech stack serves it's purpose, or it doesn't. I don't have enough free time to waste it trying to cancel others.

From the blog post, it sounds like the underlying motivation is not tied to technical aspects but control over the language. If I had invested any of my personal time onboarding onto D and migrated any of my projects to D, I would be concerned about the negative impact these political stunts have on the tech stack.

Divide by 2 and check for a decimal point.

I mean, it ain't wrong.

The biggest news to me is that GitHub allows users to search code. Every single time I tried to search something in GitHub, search results were next to completely useless, and always a sure-fire waste of time and effort.

There's hope, I guess.

We are not in the middle ages any longer, we need operate like an engineering discipline.

I'm not sure you realize how "engineering disciplines" operate as crafts.

Some engineering fields might be bounded by tons of regulations and standards and specifications, but that does not remove the craftsmanship from the problem domain. At most, those surface design requirements and convert them into hard design constraints, but that does not get rid of the need to go beyond those and leave our mark in terms of subjective definitions and measures of quality.

Also, these comments on "operate like an engineering discipline" are mostly sourced from a cargo cult mentality, where mindlessly mimicking the surface-level aspects of the things they try to emulate is perceived as being key to achieve their perceived qualities. However, software is not bound by most, if any, of the requirements that other engineering fields must adhere to. It makes no sense to presume that a solution that rose from a very specific set of constraints applied to a very specific set of problems will also be adequate for an entirely different problem subjected to entirely different constraints.

Duplicate code can be a code smell, but it's far better to have the same function definition or code block appear twice in the code than extracting a function that tightly couples two components that should not be coupled at all.

See Write Everything Twice (WET) principle.