Tony Soprano as a C Developer

If you are not familiar with The Sopranos or it has been a while since you have watched it, see this scene first.


Dr. Melphi: Segmentation faults legitimate software failures. Suppose you were controlling the board computer of a car and dereferenced an uninitialized pointer.

Tony: Let me tell you something — nowadays everyone has to use sanitizers and CI. Everyone first opens up a pull request before merging to master. Whatever happened to Ken Thompson? The strong, silent type. That was a programmer. He wasn't thinking about programming language theory, he just did what he had to do. But what they didn't know, is that once they got Ken Thompson to think about memory safety, that they wouldn't be able to shut him up! And then it's a Go this, and Python that, va fan cul'!

Dr. Melphi: (pause) You have strong feelings about this.

Tony: Let me tell you something — I took a logic course in college, so, I understand algebraic datatypes, I understand substructural logics, as a concept. But in my world that won't go down. Could my program have fewer exploits? Yeah. Who couldn't.

Dr. Melphi: Do you suffer from dead locks?

Tony: (nothing)

Dr. Melphi: Do you suffer from dead locks?

Tony: (nothing, CPU fans starts spinning audibly)