When I started on the FedEx code, was still at Georgetown (teaching computing in the business …

I started programming with C a long time ago, and even now, every few months, I dream of going back to those roots. It was so simple. You wrote code, you knew roughly which instructions it translated to, and there you went! Then I try actually going through the motions of writing a production-grade application in C and I realise why I left it behind all those years ago. There's just so much stuff one has to do on one's own, with no support from the computer. So many things that one has to get just right for it to work across edge cases and in the face of adversarial users. If I had to pick up a low-level language today, it'd likely be Ada. Similar to C, but with much more help from the compiler with all sorts of things.