Yes, it's a function of memory safety. The abstractions C provides for working with memory and the semantics of the language itself are both design choices it makes. Memory safety is one of the few places where we have robust empirical evidence on how it directly prevents bugs and security issues in practice. Robust empirical evidence is fundamentally hard to come by in software engineering research, so when we do have it, it's a strong signal.
The conclusion is that C is not simple and that the C model is not somehow "more natural" or a good fit for how people think. This was the core argument of the comment I was responding to and it is simply wrong, regardless of whether we're comparing C to functional languages or to something else. We should collectively not be drawing any conclusions by starting with C as an exemplar of how things should be.
Personally, I am certain that other aspects of C also contribute to extra bugs: implicit type coercion, undefined behavior, the C preprocessor and anything to do with concurrency all come to mind. I did not bring those up because we do not have the same kind of strong evidence for their impact and because just one problem of that magnitude should be enough to show that a language is neither simple nor natural.
I don't see how any of this is disregarding the obvious. Instead, I am making an obvious point that the original comment somehow disregarded. "Nothing is a panacea" might be true, but that does not mean that some things can't be better and other things can't be worse. C is one of the latter.
The conclusion is that C is not simple and that the C model is not somehow "more natural" or a good fit for how people think. This was the core argument of the comment I was responding to and it is simply wrong, regardless of whether we're comparing C to functional languages or to something else. We should collectively not be drawing any conclusions by starting with C as an exemplar of how things should be.
Personally, I am certain that other aspects of C also contribute to extra bugs: implicit type coercion, undefined behavior, the C preprocessor and anything to do with concurrency all come to mind. I did not bring those up because we do not have the same kind of strong evidence for their impact and because just one problem of that magnitude should be enough to show that a language is neither simple nor natural.
I don't see how any of this is disregarding the obvious. Instead, I am making an obvious point that the original comment somehow disregarded. "Nothing is a panacea" might be true, but that does not mean that some things can't be better and other things can't be worse. C is one of the latter.