+1 --- On Wed, 6/8/11, Theo de Raadt <dera...@cvs.openbsd.org> wrote:
From: Theo de Raadt <dera...@cvs.openbsd.org> Subject: Re: OT: Re: Seems OpenBSD isn't absolutely alone in it's quest, atleast on embedded systems. To: "Nicholas Marriott" <nicholas.marri...@gmail.com> Cc: "Thomas de Grivel" <billi...@gmail.com>, "Christiano F. Haesbaert" <haesba...@haesbaert.org>, "misc@openbsd.org" <misc@openbsd.org> Date: Wednesday, June 8, 2011, 3:10 AM > You are either trolling or just very mixed up, the important thing is > not how quickly machines can parse it or how quickly you can write a > lexer but how quickly humans can parse it and what they can do with > it. C is not the best here but it is way ahead of any kind of useless > functional language. Indeed. People write in languages they can understand, just like we are emailing in a language we can all understand. English sucks, yet we all use it. Why are you not trying to miscommunicate with us in dutch, Mr. de Grivel? Because it would fail (though you probably speak the perfect langauge of gmail). You fail anyways since you come off as a salesman of a perfection mythos. When we start writing something in C or any other language, we are writing a chunks of interface code and chunks of data management code. We layer the code using "interfaces" we decide on very early so that it is easier to determine where the bugs are, at least early on. However almost every time the interface decisions made early on carry on far into the future and eventually screw us. We fix all the data management bugs, and then the interface layers end up being flawed. Subtly, but flawed. They are our next problem. Then when we try to fix them, we introduce new subtle problems. However here is where you are entirely wrong: C is not different. All the languages are like that. That is because we write in the way that we think, and the way we think is biased towards the way we remember. Why the way we remember? That is so that when we see the code again, we can remember what we were thinking. When we make changes in any of them to fix a structural problem, we start to forget layers of our previous thoughts. It becomes less recognizeable. No language or programming system designed to this day is flexible enough so that we can remember the steps of our thought process, and yet also be flexible enough that it allows us to change the interfaces (without us not remembering it next time; the process is highly iterative). And then some details make it even gets worse. We are trying to develop userland programs, and libraries, and the portable include infrastructable managing the variation chaos between 32 bit and 64 bit and signed char vs unsigned char and whatnot layers of variaion; and we are trying to writing boot code, and we are writing kernels to run all this. Add in the bullshit we support it the ports subsystem, and it is no wonder our brains are struggling. When someone tells anyone that there is an answer and some cohesive language will solve this is problem... they are flat out deluded and that delusion comes out of blind stupidity. You obviously have zero experience. The only thing you have experience in is trolling mailing lists acting as if you are some expert. The real experts are the people struggling with these systems, not the pulpit heros.
