university of minnesota today coming out with groundbreaking research that the best C programmers in the world can't tell if you're giving them bad C
maybe C is bad
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I feel like I would have been tricked by this regardless of the programming language literally just on the basis of the authority of "affiliated with the university of minnesota"
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yeah this is mostly that they sent a bunch of patches claiming to be fixing issues found by static analysis tools, implying that they knew what they were doing, and coming from a reasonably trustworthy source
--> the patches got fairly little review
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Those kinds of static analysis tools don't give you reliable patches not requiring review. They have lots of false positives and are often wrong.
It's also not actually what happened. You're confusing the patches submitted in good faith with the experiment that was done by them.
They submitted the intentionally incorrect patches for the experiment from random email addresses, not their own ones. They weren't associated with the university. The ban on the university is retaliation for the experiment, not because those submissions were also part of this.
That's why people who submit them specify they were found by static analysis tools so they can be subject to further scrutiny -- one of the points of contention is that they failed to indicate this on their patches too.