I tend to disagree slightly: we all are conditioned to trust technology, often too much and whilst this is not a legal issue as long as only your own safety is concerned, it’s a huge legal and ethical issue if third parties are involved which is the case with motor vehicles on public roads.
Probably yes, although in reality embedded systems are one of the classic domains of plain C programming.
In any case, no language with automatic garbage collection should be ever left near real time systems which effectively not only rules out Python but also Go and Java.
It looks like the core safety code is written in C and runs on a separate real-time device (and I guess duplicated in python for redundancy?). This core safety is what he has effectively disabled, and why I was suggesting not say crazy stuff minimizing it (while making claims about his knowledge/focus on safety). Those statements could hurt him, so my point is simple - stick to saying one thing: it is MIT licensed so I can do whatever I want with the code.
Isn’t this company in the US where F150 is the top selling vehicle? Crazy they don’t want to make this work somehow. Makes me wonder if their plan is to push him out and do it themselves.
It is unethical, but the problem is: the whole system is unethical. To be ethical in an unethical system is really hard and one cannot always blame the ones playing the game by the rules in a system, that is unethical to begin with. Additionally, perhaps people are conditioned to just trust technology, though who is to blame? Maybe the system, probably the companies with their marketing – all this is true, but in the end, I still am convinced, that the ultimate responsibility lies in the consumer. If the consumer wants shit and buys shit all the time, then I can’t blame companies for offering shit which apparently is so expensive and popular at the same time. I often flame Apple for their wrongful behaviour, but at the same time I blame every single Apple customer who got ripped off last year and still continues to purchase Apple products first hand, this year, again.
People have to learn what they have been conditioned to forget over the past decades:
What you do is almost always your responsibility. If you blindly trust seat belts, your favourite car company, your favourite PC manufacturer – whatever it is – you chose to blindly trust them, after all.
The moment you start blindly trusting a company or your local government, this is at the same time the moment you start a downfall of some sort. In the best case, you recognize this beginning and stop it in time (most of the time there’s plenty of time to stop it) and in the worst case, that downfall can bring down entire societies. We have enough examples for this in the present, but these are of course controversial, so it’s easier to judge the past; look at Rome, Maya/Aztecs, Egypt, Mesopotamia, etc, etc. All these consisted of greatly developed societes. Now they only left remnants of the past here, mostly in form of physical artifacts.
In my opinion, the only real and harsh truth reason for why this is true is because of historical reasons. From a purely technical perspective, I am a 100% convinced, that C/++ is entirely obsolete in the year 2020 and ongoing. Of course, this is controversial, however I think the more you dive down into this language’s history and why it is here today and why we cannot just drop it right now, you always end up in one single dead end: we use it, because we have always used it, since decades. This is, in my opinion, the only root of reasons for why we still use C/++.
In a utopia, where I would be the king, I would just delete C from every production system in the world, and put all the information in musea. Every production system that would now miss C, would get a replacement of their software, written in Rust. This would make our IT world by a million times safer and more predictable.