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Too Cool For Secure Code?
An anonymous reader writes "Looks like not everyone believes Linux is the monolith of security folks might like us to think. Jon Lasser raises some interesting points in this article over at Security Focus. Though it has to be said, that whilst he focuses on the Linux/Unix side of things, a good proportion of programmers (no matter what they work on) are guilty of similar conceit to some extent."
After programmers take responsibility, perhaps they can consider using the right tool for the job, rather than the right tool for the job of their dreams.
I don't think this macho thing plays into it nearly as much as he states. I think it has to do with comfort and laziness. I've been programming in C/C++ for over 15 years, so obviously, if I have a programming task to tackle, I will lean towards using those languages. I can do a minimal amount of vb, so if I need to slap together a ui, I can, but not anything that did anything interesting. If I have a task, how much time should I spend learning a new language if that language is better suited for the task than a language I know? Since I'm new to this language, how much worse is the code going to be than what I could have written in a less suitable language?
I'm not saying that I'm against learning new languages, but a programmer can only realisticly be "good" at a small set of languages. And the realities are that unless I'm working on a pet project, I don't have the time to learn something new or try to come back up to speed on a language I last used two years ago. Perl is an excellent example in my case, I don't know a lick of it. If I have simple text processing to do, I use the "simpler" text utilities (awk and sed primarily), unless the problem is very simple, in which case I fire up my text editor. If it's more complex, then I use C/C++. Could it be done quicker in Perl, maybe, maybe not. If by quicker you allow me to ignore the ramp up time to learn the language. If I were doing this type of thing all the time, then the rampup could be amortized in the long run. If it's onsie twosie, then forget it, out comes the c compiler.