[davemp]

> For many decades, carpenters have been educated about table saw safety. But what finally stopped thousands of fingers getting chopped off every year was the introduction of the SawStop, and similar technologies.

Afaik the technology isn’t widespread and there are still 10s of thousands of injuries per year.

[pjmlp]

You mean tecnhology like bounds checking, invented during the 1950's decade, with the creation of Fortran, Lisp and Algol, and every other language derived from them, with exception of C, C++ and Objective-C?

[geodel]

And why the whole world wrote so much code in C, C++ and Objective-C when bound checking existing long before these languages without boundcheck?

[pjmlp]

It started like this,

"Although we entertained occasional thoughts about implementing one of the major languages of the time like Fortran, PL/I, or Algol 68, such a project seemed hopelessly large for our resources: much simpler and smaller tools were called for. All these languages influenced our work, but it was more fun to do things on our own."

-- https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html

Then source tapes with an almost symbolic license price for its time, and a commentary book did the rest.

[j16sdiz]

with bounds checking, out of range index still trigger exception or runtime error. Many of them results in DoS.

[pjmlp]

Much better than silent data corruption.

Then there is the whole issue of making it more interesting to look elsewhere instead.

When a door is locked I can still break in by throwing a rock to the window, yet most people do lock the door nonetheless, while most thieves only bother to break the window if there is anything actually valuable in doing so.

[chefandy]

Yeah at least in the US, it looks like tablesaw accidents that put people in the ER are about as common as they were 15 years ago. I have a buddy who just lost 6 months work because of a tablesaw accident.

[HideousKojima]

Also SawStop doesn't prevent kickback, one of the other major sources of injury from a table saw.

[nojvek]

Wow! SawStop is incredible tech. the blade stops within 5ms. That's insane.