Heartbleed and a lack of interest for a careful low level programming

A recent Heartbleed story highlighted one important aspect of software engineering: it is increasingly hard to get young people interested in security and low level programming. Programming in C is frowned upon; dealing with "old" protocols and security features is not "cool enough" to rapidly gain visible results and advance your career or inject investment in your startup.

When next Instagram or Facebook, or Twitter takes over its part of the world, they all rely on secure protocols designed and developed well in past. There is almost no doubt that C is one of the few languages your secure protocol has to be implemented in if it attempts to gain widest adoption.

While the set is looking similar to the natural fading out of mainframe programmers and Cobol developers, not being cool for youth in security represents much harder take for the industry. Even if it is not cool enough to develop and expand core libraries, there is no other choice -- our industry is too wide and multi-focused to be able to adopt a higher level language as our lingua franca. As long as it goes, we need people to work on this critical part of everyone's infrastructure and these teams need to get fresh blood every year or so not only to avoid fading out but also to prevent losing knowledge and traditions, and intangible feeling of the right thing that lives under many secure hats.