What Programming Issues Would You Fix with a Time Machine?

Honestly, if I had a time machine, I'd probably just grab some Bitcoin in its early days and bounce out of the tech scene entirely! But if we're talking about programming, I think I'd remove null-terminated strings from C. They cause so many headaches with buffer overruns and memory safety issues.

I would make USB connectors reversible from the start. It seems like such a simple thing, but it would have made life so much easier. I know they considered it but went with what was cheaper at the time. What a bummer!

Definitely the octal syntax in C! Just no. If we could have standardized on clearer number formats from the beginning, it would save programmers a lot of confusion, especially with leading zeros. And while we're at it, can we just make the syntax for pointers in C a bit less confusing?

I'd definitely fix the use of rn as line separators in Windows. It drives me crazy, and I think it stems from old teletype machinery. If we could just switch to a more straightforward format, that would save a lot of frustration.

What about fixing SQL? It's a shame SQL didn't fully implement Codd's database theories, which could've prevented a lot of the awkwardness we see today with ORMs and non-standard practices. If all of Codd's rules were adopted, we wouldn’t have as many of the problems we face with databases today! Plus, imagine how smooth querying would be.