Huh, it's almost as if the foundation of all the devices we use on a daily basis are written in some language that apparently isn't possible to write correctly.

They are mostly reliable (though probably still full of security holes) despite C—made possible by the millions of person-hours thrown at the problem of maintaining large C codebases.

Back then, we had no choice. We can do better.

Essentially all but the most used code-paths with be bug riddled. This paper [1] on finding bugs in C compilers by fuzzing is an interesting case-study.

[1] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4241

Server programming isn't even that hard. You could do it in C all day. (Just have good sandboxing for when someone finds an exploit...)

Millions of people have been writing C for games, firmware, computer systems without Internet since the 80s on, and they didn't even get software updates. If your server crashes you get a coredump and you can update anytime you want.

s/isn't possible to write correctly/is difficult to write correctly cheaply in non-trivial applications/

and you pretty much have it. Building higher-level abstractions has historically been a good thing, unless your day job is punching in opcodes.

I was more poking fun at the hyperbole that it's not possible to hire anyone who writes C at a reasonable rate.

That's basically true.

Apparently it didn't have to be C or blazing fast.