I’m addressing the bit that I quoted, saying that an interpreted language “must” have valid semantics for all code. I’m not specifically addressing whether or not JavaScript is right in this particular case of min().
…but also, what are you talking about? Python throws a type error if you call min() with no argument.
Without one, the run time system, must assign some semantics to the source code, no matter how erroneous it is.
That’s just not true; as the comment above points out, Python also has no separate compilation step and yet it did not adopt this philosophy. Interpeted languages were common before JavaScript; in fact, most LISP variants are interpreted, and LISP is older than C.
Moreover, even JavaScript does sometimes throw errors, because sometimes code is simply not valid syntactically, or has no valid semantics even in a language as permissive as JavaScript.
So Eich et al. absolutely could have made more things invalid, despite the risk that end-users would see the resulting error.
The user who submitted the report that Stenberg considered the “last straw” seems to have a history of getting bounty payouts; I have no idea how many of those were AI-assisted, but it’s possible that by using an LLM to automate making reports, they’re making some money despite having a low success rate.
So…like an old fashioned camera iris?
All the others are not very butthole-ish, though.
There are definitely more experienced programmers using it. I can’t find the post at the moment, but there was a recent-ish blog post citing a bunch of examples. [edit: found it: https://registerspill.thorstenball.com/p/they-all-use-it ]
Personally, I don’t use AI much, but I do occasionally experiment with it (for instance, I recently gave Claude Sonnet the same live-coding interview I give candidates for my team; it…did worse than I expected, tbh). The experimenting is sufficient for me to recognize these phrases.
It’s not in C, if that’s what you mean.
It’s a “stream manipulator” function that not only generates a new line, it also flushes the stream.
None of the features discussed are aesthetic only.
Nope. It links to an explanation of what that poster is:
This is the UNIX Magic Poster, originally created by Gary Overacre in the mid-1980s and published by UniTech Software.
Rent eating 30-40% of your income is extremely normal, isn’t it? Or is that only true in the US (where it has recently become much more than that for many people)?
Probably moreso for expressing the opinion so strongly without actually knowing any of the three languages.
Edit: I’m just guessing why a different comment got downvotes. Why am I getting downvotes?
Doesn’t the first edition use K&R style parameter lists and other no-longer-correct syntax?
I think generally C compilers prefer to keep the stack intact for debugging and such.
Okay, yeah, I was indeed reading your original reply as a criticism of one of the people involved (presumably the security researcher), rather than as a criticism of the post title. Sorry for misunderstanding.
Apparently GCC does indeed do tail-call optimization at -O2: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Optimize-Options.html#index-foptimize-sibling-calls
But in that case, I’m not sure why the solution to the denial of service vulnerability isn’t just “compile with -foptimize-sibling-calls.”
…what is your point? Some software (in a language that doesn’t have tail-recursion optimization) used recursion to handle user-provided input, and indeed it broke. Someone wrote to explain that that’s a potential vulnerability, the author agreed, and fixed it. Who here is misunderstanding how computers implement recursion?
What about Julia?
Is Fortran really your favorite language?
There is only one mention of Python being slow, and that’s in the form of a joke where Python is crossed out and replaced with “the wrong tool for the job.” Elsewhere in the post, Python is mentioned more positively; it just isn’t what’s needed for the kind of gamedev the author wants to do.