Ken Thompson on languages and safety
(from @peterseibel 's book, Coders at Work)pic.twitter.com/RfSsPCrUFo
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One thing I've always found funny about the "programmers deserve problems if they make mistakes" attitude is that most of the cost falls onto users, not programmers. Do people think users deserve problems because of original sin or something?
Uncle Bob's comments remind me of an old Far Side cartoon where an airplane had a switch labelled "wings stay on / wings fall off".
Also, "just do it right" can be carried up a level. Why blame users of PHP for using the wrong function and not the creators of PHP for creating the wrong function? Where was the pair partner? Where was the review? Did they read through the code first?
Syntactic sugar is important
I think the point is — maybe it shouldn’t be called “sugar” but actually “nutrition”!
Worth noting that Swift ultimately decided against isEven and isOdd (still not sure that was right, but we can revisit it), in favor of the more generic isMultiple(of:).
And a big reason we considered it was because there’s a not-uncommon way people write it incorrectly, since x % 2 == 1 is wrong in languages where % follows the sign of x
I'm not convinced that this actually helps people over the course of a career. They're gonna be sorta screwed when they need a test for divisibility by something else, like 3. Educating people about the tools they already have might be better.
Feels like a false dichotomy to me. There can be user-centric reasons to carefully curate the size of the standard library or the surface area of a programming language.
Can we at least agree that the former thread is the worst? 
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