> Spiritual equivalent of a life sciences forum discovering memory safety, one person who wrote code for a bit saying they wrote a memory bug in C once, then someone clutching pearls about why programmers irresponsibly write memory unsafe code given it has a global impact.

I used to be a code monkey, I wrote systems software at megacorps, and still can't understand why so many programmers irresponsibly write memory unsafe code given it has a global impact.

So Poe's law applies here.

That's the analogy working as intended: the answer to "why do programmers still write memory-unsafe code" is the same shape as "why do microplastics researchers still wear gloves." The real answer is boring and full of tradeoffs. The HN thread version skips to indignation: "they never thought of contamination so ipso facto all the research is suspect"

(to go a bit further, in case it's confusing: both you and I agree on "why do people opt-in to memunsafe code in 2026? There’s no reason to" - yet, we also understand why Linux/Android/Windows/macOS/ffmpeg/ls aren't 100% $INSERT_MEM_SAFE_LANGUAGE yet, and in fact, most new written for them is memunsafe)