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If you outlaw programming languages, only outlaws will program...

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Edvard:
This is real:  :huh:

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/outlaw-programming-languages-threaten-safety-american-people-and-work-counter-our-way-life
WE PETITION THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO:
Outlaw programming languages that threaten the safety of the American people and work counter to our way of life.
...
My specific suggested list of languages to restrict from use, and phase out includes:
Javascript, Ruby, and Java.
--- End quote ---

I signed.

f0dder:
Hummm, C and C++ are more of a threat to the safety of people than any of the three listed languages - given the mix of the domains where those languages are used, the exreme amount of undefined behavior in the languages, and the very few people who can get it right :)

Edvard:
Yeah, the premise is pretty much a joke, so signing it is like spitting in the ocean while wearing a clown suit.  As far as his hit list is concerned, Java is not high on my list of favorites, Ruby I find interesting but feels like a re-invention of Python, and truth be told, I can't say I like Javascript at all (says me after my 3rd attempt to learn JS, only to be frustrated and distracted).  I'll probably eventually end up learning it if I just knuckle down and put my mind to it, but I always find myself asking "If Javascript is so cool, why do people keep feeling the need to re-invent it every 6 months?"

* Edvard waits for webassembly to mature, and prays for a pascal front-end  :P

f0dder:

--- ---<rant>Yeah, between "It's a joke" and "The author is absolutely bonkers", I used Occam's Razor and went with joke :)

I still find it worth to reflect on, though. And while C++ is (still) my all-time favorite, I'm pretty convinced that C and C++ are the two most dangerous widely-used languages, and in ways that leads to real-world problems. Java is pretty safe as a language, Ruby has a few nasties, and JavaScript and PHP has a bunch of issues (that are different from the issues of C/C++ - it's mostly about making it easy to write incorrect logic rather than summoning nasal demons).

Once you include implementations of the languages, the picture changes a bit. Once you include the standard libraries, it changes a lot (Java has some really funky attack vectors, deserilization attacks being oretty popular), and once you puddle standard frameworks on top it the game changes again, leaving PHP and Ruby pretty high on the exploitability lists (hello wordpress, hello rails).

But then again, expoitability isn't directly equatable to danger, one should probably also take severity of the system into account. "Plane falling" down is usually worse than "blog being hacked".

So if one really wanted to ban specific languages, one would have to think long and hard about what and why and how - and whether some languages are fine, whereas we might want to purge a ton of their frameworks. I'm pretty sure PHP should be purged. I'm not sure whether any new code should be written in C/C++, but I'm also not sure whether we have languages that can fully replace them for everything.

Oh, and I wish there was something else than JavaScript for the web. The language and stdlib has a bunch of flaws - that it's relatively small is the only reason it's not on the 100%-purge-with-fire list. At the same time the stdlib is a bit too small, though, leading to zillions of monkeys reinventing (broken) wheels. And the DOM and all the related browserstuff is too big and messed up.

--- ---</rant>

Edvard:
Oh, and I wish there was something else than JavaScript for the web.
-f0dder (March 23, 2016, 09:56 PM)
--- End quote ---

https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=41135

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