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New NSA-Funded Code Rolls All Programming Languages Into One

Posted by timothy on from the so-your-program-can-confuse-itself dept.

An anonymous reader writes "What's your favorite programming language? Is it CSS? Is it JavaScript? Is it PHP, HTML5, or something else? Why choose? A new programming language developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University is all of those and more — one of the world's first "polyglot" programming languages. Sound cool? It is, except its development is partially funded by the National Security Agency, so let's look at it with a skeptical eye. It's called Wyvern — named after a mythical dragon-like thing that only has two legs instead of four — and it's supposed to help programmers design apps and websites without having to rely on a whole bunch of different stylesheets and different amalgamations spread across different files.

6 of 306 comments (clear)

  1. Wyvern = Wyrm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Why? What's the worst that could happen? What's the best?

    Why is the NSA interested in something like that directly? What is the potential for abuse?

    Is it to make code analysis that much more centralized and (supposedly) simple?

    Why didn't this come up with itself before now?

    1. Re:Wyvern = Wyrm by ObsessiveMathsFreak · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The standard NSA tatctic for introducing security holes into a system is to obfuscate things so that holes are hard to spot and find. SELinux is probably such a system, and this polglot language -- which effectviely makes debugging impossible -- is likely another.

      --
      May the Maths Be with you!
    2. Re: Wyvern = Wyrm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Not impressed. The OP obviously doesn't understand a thing about programming languages in general, or programming as an activity in particcular. Or he would know that the use of multiple files, and multiple languages, is a means to an end, not a nuisance. Namely to manage complexity, and to use the most appropriate level of abstraction to solve a particular problem. If he'd know he would not claim that wyvern is a polyglot language, but that it is a meta language to create internal DSLs, domain specific languages. So if anything it is a tool to create new languages, as oppose to to eliminate existing ones as by his claim. Poor sod

  2. Not programming languages by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Hate to break it to you, but HTML5 and CSS are not programming languages.

  3. Compiler virus by penguinoid · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Wasn't there some discussion on how effective a special, compiler-embedded virus would be? This seems like a good candidate for that.

    --
    Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
  4. Which behaviour? by NotInHere · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This program is valid C and, when saved as "test2.java", valid java code. Compilation with the C compiler results in a program that doesn't behave the same way if it were compiled with java:

    //\
    /*
    #include "stdio.h"
    /**///\
    public class test2 {

    //\
    public static
    void main //\
    (String[]a)//\
    /*
    (int argc, char *argv[])//*/
    {
      //\
      System.out.printf("hi, I'm java\n");/*
      printf("hi, I'm C\n");//*/
    }

    //\
    }