This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I’m not sure what to think about this. It’s bizarre, the White House making any recommendations on programming languages.
They’re definitely not seen as an authority in this field. Why would anyone care what recommendation they make? And so why make one at all?
They’re definitely not seen as an authority in this field. Why would anyone care what recommendation they make?
It's possible that they are acting on the advice of advisors who are authorities in this field.
And so why make one at all?
I expect it's because information and industrial security are components of national security, which is of great concern to them, and those things depend on software.
I'm not surprised to see this, given that state-sponsored electronic attacks are on the rise these days.
This is exactly why people sound sophomoric when they say "lobbying needs to go!" There are some drastic problems with lobbying as it is allowed now, but the last thing we need is the government regulating things they know nothing about without the input of experts. On top of that, it's nonsense that I can't pass my local councilman on the street and stop and push them to spend more time addressing important issues like climate change.
It's important to remember that the argument against lobbying isn't about the broadest sense of the word "lobbying", but rather about corporations and other moneyed interests having unfair and unhealthy influence over the laws that govern everyone else.
The people who decry lobbying probably agree with you; they're just using the word in an implicitly narrow context.
It’s a national security threat
C/C++ is a threat to mental stability
There have been words around this, like how software should be safe by design, but the regulation should come from the governing entity. This is simply materialized now, but there has been momentum.
Gov is getting rusty
I agree, let's start with dumping Windows.
Done, next the Linux kernel? 😱
It's a hard sacrifice to make, but if that means killing Windows, then mwahahaha... I mean, MS's power lies in supporting all that legacy.
Team Fortran raise up, but not too fast our old bones aren't as strong as they used to be.
Maybe you can use Team COBOL's wheelchairs as walkers?
Good luck with that, C/C++ are still crazy popular
well... that's the point - if they weren't this wouldn't be a concern
We really need to get the kids to stop programming with punch cards. /s
I think we should politicize code. It seems so unfettered by politics so far while so many other things are nicely split amongst party lines. Seems like maybe the Republicans should embrace C and the democrats can have python or something.
Republicans get C, Java, Lua, and C++; Democrats get Ada, Rust, C#, and Python; Libertarians get Zig, TCL, Julia, and Ocaml for some reason.
Ruby is just one guy, Vermin Supreme
Ruby-off-the-rails
Vermin Supreme still stands by his pony plan doesn’t he? You KNOW he’s out here using FiM++
I thought this is a tech space, but you've just made a lot of people Republicans.
One would also expect Ada to be Republican.
And can libertarians please have Common Lisp?
Ada could never be republican, on the basis that it's named after a british woman scientist. I don't think she's on record as a feminist, but that's about the only thing that would make her "worse" in their eyes
Also why do the democrats only get languages for people who don't care about performances ? /s ^(it's just a prank bro)
I was thinking about the association of the Ada language with defense stuff, and also her being Byron's daughter, which is more specific than being British, I'm not sure she'd complain about associations with Republicanism, but then this can also be interpreted in favor of libertarians.
No, the question is valid about weird selection of languages for Democrats. I think what they meant is that separation of various issues between parties is orthogonal to any sane logic, so we should do this with programming languages too.
Also I want to know who gets Erlang.
Can I both upvote and downvote you? Seems most appropriate
C/C++: so bad that even the white house takes notice 😂
C isn't bad. It has been a good portable assembly language for ages, and remains so today. What's problematic is continuing to use it where more advanced languages now make more sense.
I won't defend C++, though. I'm happy to kick it to the curb now that better alternatives are gaining traction.
The problem with C++ is not the lack of safety features. It's the ever lasting backwards compatibility that is keeping it both alive and down at the same time.
Having to support 50 year old code, is going to limit any restriction you place. But it is usually the restrictions that make a language good.
Example: You can write perfectly good modern C++ code without any pointers. But pointers are so ingrained into the language, that it is impossible to remove them.
Probably a good idea, plenty of languages out there that can give good performance while being memory safe nowadays.
Such as? (Non-programmer here, so I don't know the ins and outs of programming languages.)
Zig and Rust come to mind, at least for replacements for low level languages.
C#
Isn't that only microsoft exclusive and closed source? Also does compiling it really yield the same speed as C, it is garbage collected isn't it?
Was always possible to compile+run C# on Linux using the Mono project. Until Microsoft "bought them out" and created .NET Core, a cross platform version of .NET that MS now encourages people to use instead...
Microsoft's new linux compile tools rub me the wrong way slightly, with the telemetry that's opt-in by default.
Mono is still extremely valuable for older .NET Framework apps under WINE though, way easier to setup compared to the official installers from what i've experienced.
No idea how compiled C# compares to C...
Compiled C# is about half the speed of C/C++
https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/box-plot-summary-charts.html
*proceeds to wrap everything in unsafe {}
Wtf, I thought this was a meme...
“We, as a nation, have the ability—and the responsibility—to reduce the attack surface in cyberspace and prevent entire classes of security bugs from entering the digital ecosystem but that means we need to tackle the hard problem of moving to memory safe programming languages,” National Cyber Director Harry Coker said in the White House news release.
o7
Good reason to not drop C and C++
Can’t we just bring back Forth and call it a day?
