Ken Thompson on languages and safety
(from @peterseibel 's book, Coders at Work)pic.twitter.com/RfSsPCrUFo
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Interesting to see Swift's justification for adding isEven and isOdd to the language (because it would help people) in contrast to old school attitude attitudes (people who don't know everything or make mistakes deserve punishment). https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/master/proposals/0225-binaryinteger-iseven-isodd-ismultiple.md …pic.twitter.com/X6DA7JzQMh
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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?
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It's weird to me that programmers & language designers seem to not understand that a programming language is a HCI design problem as much as a GUI is. would you blame the pilot if "self destruct" button was next to "autopilot"?
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The vast majority of programmers don't have to use assembly or write their own mutex and condition variable implementations etc. It is already extremely friendly. It would be ridiculous to transform medicine so doctors need not know anything at all, but that's what you ask for
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if we could transform medicine so that doctors can know less and get better outcomes we should absolutely do it
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There's still a lot of the sentiment "it was hard for me to learn, it should be hard for you" floating around.
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I think it is two things: 1) he who pays the piper calls the tune and the suits pay for good enough not elegant 2) there's a sucker born every minute
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This seems like a weird and unsympathetic take. Nobody deserves problems. Yes, our tools could always be better. We can still take responsibility to protect our users as best we can and this includes understanding the rough edges of our tools. This can apply at any level.
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I think it's just that a lot of people miss the big picture
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punishment seems to be a particularly in vogue mindset for the boomer generation, i wonder how much of this is a reflection of that broader societal trend
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I think it's a machismo informed by unix culture that explains this kind of thinking.
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Also strong part of this is the pathology among this brand of programmers that prioritizes some abstract "good code" over delivering a quality product.
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