DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language [LWN.net]

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 2, 2022 10:20 UTC (Mon) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
In reply to: DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language by ddevault
Parent article: DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

The programmer I am most concerned about trusting is not Present Me; ultimately, there is no way to avoid the need to trust Present Me when I am programming, since even if the language stops me committing memory safety errors, it generally can't stop me committing all the other kinds of error that can make my application accidentally give the User's security details to the minions of Mob, God, and Cop without the User's permission (though some languages and runtime libraries are better at inconveniencing me when I try to make those errors than others).

The programmers I am concerned about trusting are the different people called Future Me (will I be able to extend this code safely?), Past Me (did I write my old code safely in the first place?), and Not Me (did they write their code safely, and will they be able to extend my code safely?)

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DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 2, 2022 10:32 UTC (Mon) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link] (1 responses)

Those are all good points, but it's not about *completely avoiding* the need to trust programmers, that's a straw-man. It's about *minimizing* the need to trust programmers where we have proven techniques to reduce such trust that aren't unduly burdensome. And Rust and Swift and other languages with good type systems have lots of ways to do that beyond just memory safety!

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 2, 2022 11:20 UTC (Mon) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

Oh, absolutely; I think I've phrased myself poorly.

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 2, 2022 15:08 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

And specifically what I want, as a programmer with similar views to you, is for Present Me to be able to write my code such that when Future Me or Not Me (lacking the context Present Me is immersed in right now) does something foolish with it, they will get protests from the language implementation (compiler or interpreter) that tell them what context they need to acquire in order to be able to do their job without the protesting.

This is just because programming is hard, and there's a lot of context behind every decision you make while programming. If you lack that context, you'll make mistakes, and one of the things I now value in programming languages is telling you that you're missing context.