[WiSaGaN]

Or programming language design. However, I think during the process, things are still distilled so that new common patterns are incorporated. I am sure null-terminated strings were not a particularly bad idea in the 70s given the constraints developers faced at the time. It's just that later we have different constraints and have gained more experience, thus finally realizing that it is an unsafe design.

[mikepurvis]

I expect it's basically always been understood that null-terminated strings were unsafe (after all, strncpy has existed since the 70s [1]), more just that the various costs of the alternatives (performance, complexity, later on interop) weren't seen as worth it until more recent times. And it's not like they didn't get tried— Pascal has always had length-prefixed strings as its default, and it's a contemporary of C.

[1]: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/450802

[wongarsu]

We are coming full circle back to Pascal Strings, just that now we don't mind using 32 or 64 bytes for the length prefix. And in cases where we do mind we are now willing to spend a couple of instructions on variable length integers.

But in the bigger picture the wheel of programming languages is a positive example of reinvention. We do get better at language design. Not just because the requirements become more relaxed due to better hardware and better compilers, but also because we have gained many decades of experience which patterns and language features are desirable. And of course the evolution of IDEs plays a huge role: good indentation handling is crucial for languages like python, and since LSP made intelligent auto-complete ubiquitous strong typing is a lot more popular. And while old languages do try to incorporate new developments, many have designed themselves into corners. That's where new languages can gain the real advantage, by using the newest insights and possibilities from the get-go, depending on them in standard library design and leaving out old patterns that fell out of favor.

No modern language in their right mind would still introduce functions called strstr, atoi or snwprint. Autocomplete and large screens make the idea of such function names antipatterns. But C can't easily get rid of them.