anomaly

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Mon, 11 May 2015 11:37 pm, Mel Wilson wrote:

> On Sun, 10 May 2015 14:12:44 -0500, boB Stepp wrote:
> 
>> I have to admit being surprised by this, too. I am just now studying on
>> how to write my own classes in Python, and have come to realize that
>> doing this is *possible*, but the *surprise* to me is why the language
>> design allowed this to actually be done.
> 
> Read Cory Doctorow lately on the War Against General Purpose Computing,
> where a bunch of people who don't really understand are trying to make it
> impossible for any computer to do something that is The Wrong Thing.

I think you are conflating two different ideas of "the Wrong Thing".

One is a political view, driven almost entirely by a small subset of the
copyright industry. They are driven by fear of losing control, and greed.

But the other, the one Bob refers to, comes from the technical view that
writing correct code that does what you want is hard, and we need the help
of the compiler and programming language to do it.

Trivial and easy to make mistakes in coding shouldn't mean that your
computer gets taken over by criminals on the other side of the world and
used to send spam at your expense. Buffer overflows, integer overflow,
undefined behaviour in C, cross-site scripting attacks, SQL injection
attacks, the list goes on. Bugs in code are not only inconvenient and
expensive, they can literally kill.

The two ideas are completely unrelated.

The first group wants *outside parties* (the copyright cartels) to control
what you can do with your computer. They want to take away your control.

The second wants to give you tools which you can use to give you the control
you currently lack.

Right now, whatever computer you are running, there are probably anything up
to a couple of dozen ways that the NSA or criminal gangs can use to take
over your computer and use it against you. Some of the people reading this
message have already had their computer subverted and don't know it. (Some
know it, but don't care, out of either apathy, sheer irresponsibility, or
learned helplessness.)

Basically, human beings aren't clever enough to write bug-free code, and
those bugs mean that we lose control of our computers. (Sony once, and
infamously, actually used a Windows root kit to try to copy-protect some
music CDs.) We need better tools which extend our abilities to write
bug-free code, and those tools are new programming languages and code
analysis tools. They put us in control, they don't take it away.



-- 
Steven