> This is a trap many programmers fall into. You should be parsing, not validating.

Maybe it was an unfortunate choice of words on my part. Additionally, and I only meant to indicated how it was promoted/advertised, rather than make any statement about weather it was a sound argument. Either way, at the end of the day, a parser is a validator all the same.

Sure, more (domain) specific parsers indeed make better code (duh). That's true for both compile time and run time parsing. But how often, in real life business situation, is there enough time to create a solid architecture and fully fleshed out (domain) specific (run time, or compile time) parsers?

Again, I'm not disputing that statically typed languages may have a potential for creating more structurally healthy code. However, from my experience it still takes a hell of a lot of time and effort (for which there often is no room in real life business situations). Dynamically typed languages often create seriously flawed software, no doubt about that. But I'm convinced that this is more because many programmers just don't do what they actually should be doing in any case (in any language).

Statically types language can alleviate that problem a little, by forcing programmers to think more about what they should already be thinking about in the first place. But it is not a magic bullet. I'm not even going to discuss the downsides from overly specified/specific software code.

> This is wrong, and it's wrong for "theory vs. reality" reasons.

In case you missed it: my main gripe with all of this is that I just can not find any of all these great improvements, that evangelists keep pushing, in actual real world examples (at least not within my personal experience). Yet here you try to convince me that my point it too much theory and telling me a story about how real world programming actually works. Seriously? I mentioned C to indicate from which direction in the industry I come from, nothing more. Well, maybe also to indicate that I've been doing this for some time now.

No need to tell me how programmers work (plenty of experience with that), or making excuses for how it's just human nature for them to fuck up if they aren't held by their hand. I might have bought that kind of bullshit 25 years go. There have been plenty of attempts, purporting to to give programmers better tools and assist them writing better software. Most of them with only good intentions. Nothing new about that, about as old as commercial software itself. However, I've seen a rather depressing trend how all of those hardly ever held up in reality, over time. Whether that is because the knowledge level of programmers constantly degrades, or if it is because such solutions promote laziness, that might be more of a philosophical discussion and hard to establish as fact.

I find it at least a bit ironic though, how I apparently am being schooled on how I "just don't get it right", by what to me sounds and smells a hell of a lot like theoretical evangelical drivel itself. In fact, at this point I can't help but recall an iconic argument about how plants crave Brawndo, because of the electrolytes.

Keep on programming the way you do. If you are a good programmer, it shouldn't matter which language or tools you use. I wish you nothing but the best and good luck. Time will tell if Rust will survive the hype and actually deliver what it has been promising for a while. Maybe it indeed will. I'm not holding my breath though. Especially not since (nontransparent) corporate influence/control on languages and tools in becoming an ever growing factor (with all kind of problems associated with it).