I've got a friend who wrote one of the early, seminal books on the programming language C. He used to love looking for silly programming errors, such as

#define MAX 100; int arr[MAX];

Wait, what's wrong with that, you're just defining the size of an integer array, right?

Nope. You don't actually create an array with that code because of an errant semi-colon. Later on in your code when you refer to arr, that's exactly what you'll be saying when it causes a problem ("Arrr!").

It turns out that Windoze has millions of lines of C and C+ code in it, and after spending decades discovering all those errant semi-colons and other bits that sometimes lead people to the Blue Screen of Death, Microsponge finally has an answer: let their copilot (AI) help them rewrite everything into Rust.

Yeah, programming languages have strange names (C, Rust, Python, Lingo, Pony, etc.). But do we really want Rusty Windoze?

The exact quote (I don't make things up!) is: "Our North Star is 1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code" said someone who never read Mythical Man Month, or thinks that it doesn't apply to AI agents. Moreover, Microspunge has tens of thousands of enginers and is also claiming this AI task will take them until at least 2030 to accomplish.

More like "thousands of engineers, years of work, and all the code we can still find sources for."

It's not that Microsponge hasn't counted on Rust before. Parts of the Windoze 11 kernel are written in Rust. Apparently the non-buggy, non-crashy, totally secure parts.

All this from the company that once had a block of source code that was marked "Do not change this section of code. Any changes will break the system." (A programmer friend and I tested this. Yes, any change to that block of bytes broke the system, even adding a NOP (no operation). But nobody could figure out why, so it just became a "protected area." Call it the Windoze Wilderness. Good luck, AI.)