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Comment by pjungwir | Hacker News Reader

The people on HN are a big part of those defining the future of Clojure and other languages, so I'm glad to see an article like this raise awareness of something that will bite many as Clojure grows. Lines like these suggest the set-then-unset bit is part of a broader issue:

    ;; By a weird coincidence this week I wanted to read a file of data
    ;; coming from a web app, and I was about to use Clojure's reader to
    ;; do it.

It's disappointing to see that some Clojure practitioners are more interested in downvoting my comment and minimizing that issue rather than educating people about it.

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I didn't downvote your comment, but I hold your sentiment in low esteem.

We don't stress over this for the same reason we don't stress over strlen-style errors. They're considered part of the basic education for the language. If someone does do this, they are operating below the expected standard for the language.

There is only so much a language and environment can be expected to do for you. Your understanding of trivial concepts like, "Loading code from untrusted sources is dangerous" is not an unreasonable bar to set. It is only an "issue" if you are fundamentally misinformed about writing software in interpreted environments.

This.

It's bizarre that you can think something is "the expected standard for the language" but also not worth pointing out. How are people supposed to learn it?

There are incompetent programmers that no effort can reach, sure, but there are also junior programmers who are just innocent and haven't yet learned all the implications of what they're doing. I think it's important to teach these people, whether re Ruby or C or Clojure or whatever. That people treat such teaching with disdain makes me think they are misled by their defensiveness. It's not an insult of Clojure to say that (as in any language) there is stuff worth warning people about.

> How are people supposed to learn it?

By understanding the halting problem and the implications thereof? This is not Clojure-specific, it's part of any dynamic eval tool.

> It's not an insult of Clojure to say that (as in any language) there is stuff worth warning people about.

This argument might hold some water if the presentation of the information was not couched in a different way. It is clearly not that. And you are clearly more concerned with being right than teaching people, from the words you are choosing to use.

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