On Jul 7, 2007, at 7:23 , Thomas Conway wrote:
I've been working in a mostly Python shop this last year, and it reinforces my belief that people who don't like strong static typing are yahoos, not professionals interested in producing high quality code. Maybe I just don't get the line between professionalism and paranoia. ;-)
Security is one of my "side specialties" (i.e. not my main focus as a sysadmin, but a greater focus than e.g. storage or networking which aren't really my focus at all). And it seems to me that most people treat it about the same way they treat the notion of strong typing. In fact, I could make pretty much the same point about professionalism vs. paranoia with respect to security; the difference being that, thanks to Internet-facing credit card processing systems, at least *some* people have had their faces rubbed in their mistakes. (This correspondence is in fact one of the reasons I became interested in Haskell. http://blog.moertel.com/articles/2006/10/18/a- type-based-solution-to-the-strings-problem is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping to find.) -- brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH