From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] Awk or Limbo ?
From: geoff.9fans@collyer.net
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Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 22:37:10 -0400
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Limbo programs do seem to be more robust against buffer overflows,
deliberate or accidental, but I believe that the fundamental problem
is this: to be a good programmer, you have to be willing to cope with
all the details inherent in programming, and apparently most of the
population don't have the personality traits (patience, attention to
detail, etc.)  to do it (though that doesn't stop them trying).  One
of the advantages of writing substantial quantities of
assembly-language code is that everything else seems so much easier,
since there is so much less detail to deal with.  Limbo removes still
more fiddly details of memory allocation.  I think some of the
advantages of automatic string allocation can be had using Plan 9's
libString, which has existed for years inside upas.

But there's really no excuse for using gets() nor overrunning static
buffers.  If there's isn't a suitable routine around for the task at
hand, you write one.  It's amazing to me that as Sendmail, Inc. stamp
out one buffer overrun, another pops up, and it's 18 years later.
It's like a Conservation of Overruns.  These problems could have been
found and fixed in a pass over the code with a small string library
(such as the one we used in C News).  But the kids would rather write
yet another sorely-needed Linux desktop manager than tackle real
problems.  Rotten kids...

Barry Shein commented that `X was written by seventeen-year-olds who
can't program sitting down' (I hope I haven't misquoted him) and it
shows.  There's a little known program in the Plan 9 distribution,
Brenda Baker's dup(1), that one can run over the source of the latest
whiz-bang program and get a sense for how much code was cut-and-pasted
instead of converted into proper functions, presumably by the same
sort of kids with bladders full of Jolt cola.  Incidentally, the
distributed /rc/bin/dup didn't work when I last looked; here's a fixed
one:

#!/bin/rc
path=(/$cputype/bin/aux $path)
pdup $* | dupstat

See http://www.collyer.net/~geoff/cant.ps (when our DSL line is up)
for a longer, somewhat dated rant.