Return of the Statically Typed Languages
beust.com
beust.com
"Javascript is on the verge of becoming part of the assembly language family, and toolkits like GWT are making sure that this will happen before too many developers join the pool of low level language victims. I'm sure you can relate to that stigma."
In the first place, JS is a neat little language that, with a few (okay, a lot) more libraries could easily serve as a replacement for Perl, Python, Ruby, etc. Categorizing it as 'low level' or 'assembly' -like seems like a terrific mistake.
In the second place, the assumption that someone would rather work with Java/GWT than JS seems a little provincial. His point seems to be that he would rather code Java than JS, GWT makes that possible so .... everyone will use the tools he prefers. I think there's a flaw in there, somewhere.
In the third place, what 'stigma' is associated with the 'assembly language family', and/or what makes someone a 'victim' of a 'low level' language? Everything has its place, and while it's only rarely useful, a background in ASM is an excellent foundation for a programmer's knowledge. ASM is also useful for solving the occasional nasty bug, understanding security vulnerabilities, working with bytecode, and reverse engineering for fun and profit.
The third point may be minor, but it really poisons the whole article, for me.
Subject: My name is Cedric Beust and I caused you to get unwanted email
Message:
Hello,
I am Cedric and I blog on beust.com.
I have allowed everyone's email to be exposed throught my sloppy, weak security. I work at Google and this secruity lapse reflects poorly on Google too of course.
If you received this email, then your private email address has been scrapped from my weblog and posted to http://www.newsreadersite.eu/?page=562
This error on my part cannot be undonw of course. The mailbots have already scrapped your email address and now your address is runined forever. I hope it wasn't important to you.
I like to talk about important things like computer languages and architecture on my weblog, but I know so little about security that I allowed all of your addresses to be scrapped.
Sorry I am so lame,
Cedric
Which goes a long way towards explaining why I have started getting SPAM on a previously clean email address.
The original author is correct, if you are a system architect at BEA and then you move to Google and you still can't keep a blog site secure, it is pretty lame.
There is nothing else like emacs. Sure emacs lisp could use some help (some of us are working on adding coroutines for parallelism), but that doesn't mean it's dead. If anything else were like emacs but better, we would all ditch it.
Summary: this guy is fucking clueless. He's an IDE-wielding weenie that has only ever used Java. Great.
Things like properties files and pickled objects that left the image -- you aren't covered then. But there's little you need those for that you can't do in-image.