The Most Expensive One-byte Mistake - ACM Queue: "To a lot of people, C is a dead language, and ${lang} is the language of the future, for ever-changing transient values of ${lang}. The reality of the situation is that all other languages today directly or indirectly sit on top of the Posix API and the NUL-terminated string of C.
When your Java, Python, Ruby, or Haskell program opens a file, its runtime environment passes the filename as a NUL-terminated string to open(3), and when it resolves queue.acm.org to an IP number, it passes the host name as a NUL-terminated string to getaddrinfo(3). As long as you keep doing that, you retain all the advantages when running your programs on a PDP/11, and all of the disadvantages if you run them on anything else."
