How can C Programs be so Reliable?
I would contend that C does very little in the way of preventing errors and debugging them if they occur. The claim that  "[..] only two C-specific errors have thus far caused any real problem in the Converge VM," is completely beside the point. Language specific errors have never been the problem. Java's infamous null-pointer exceptions are not java specific: the C equivalent would be a segfault. And please do note, that Java prints a stack trace by default to help correct the mistake. A huge step forward from C's generic segfault.<p>The real reason that most C programs in daily use are so robust, is because they are ages old. Many, many man-years have been invested in the production of e.g. BSD, unix tools, POSIX libraries, and even web browsers and word processors.<p>Why do we use Javascript and even PHP to program web-applications? Because we need fewer lines to get the same result. Moreover, given the correlation between number of lines and number of bugs, shorter programs are better.
If we had been limited to C "web 2.0" would have been decades away.