As far as I'm concerned, being able to understand English is crucial to meaningful interpretation of literature written in that language, and being able to write and speak English with mastery is crucial to effective self-expression as a critic. So English mastery is not just "incidental and important", it is absolutely vital to the success of the English major who aspires to more than mediocrity.
I feel the same way about software development. Writing software sloppily results in software the functional objectives of which can be subverted, either accidentally or intentionally. Such software cannot be said to satisfy those objectives, and thus it must be seen as failing, at least partially. It's only because we have accepted such partial failure for as long as there has been software that our standards for what we consider "goodness" for software are so poor. If we applied the same poor standards to safety-critical mechanical systems a heck of a lot more of us would be reading this mailing list from hospital beds, nursing home rooms, or the afterlife. That's if they even have Internet access in the afterlife. Karen Mercedes Goertzel, CISSP Associate 703.698.7454 goertzel_ka...@bah.com ________________________________________ From: sc-l-boun...@securecoding.org [sc-l-boun...@securecoding.org] On Behalf Of Matt Bishop [bis...@cs.ucdavis.edu] Sent: Thursday, August 20, 2009 9:27 AM To: Secure Coding List Subject: Re: [SC-L] What is the size of this list? ...So I agree with what Rob posted, and I did have one thought. Is writing good English a "minor" objective of an English major? Probably, in the sense English curricula focus on interpretation of literature, literary criticism, and other aspects of literature. But it's an essential one. So perhaps "incidental and important" describes how I feel better than "minor". Matt _______________________________________________ Secure Coding mailing list (SC-L) SC-L@securecoding.org List information, subscriptions, etc - http://krvw.com/mailman/listinfo/sc-l List charter available at - http://www.securecoding.org/list/charter.php SC-L is hosted and moderated by KRvW Associates, LLC (http://www.KRvW.com) as a free, non-commercial service to the software security community. _______________________________________________
