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I've personally watched experienced, mature, and very senior developers build sophisticated systems with Clojure, Ring, and http-kit. And blink at me owlishly w

by Kalium 8y ago

I've personally watched experienced, mature, and very senior developers build sophisticated systems with Clojure, Ring, and http-kit. And blink at me owlishly when I ask them how they sanitize their inputs to guard against SQL injection. They'd been intensely focused on the core logic, architecture, system design, and business functions. Everything else received cursury consideration. My takeaway from that is that it's unreasonable to expect even the best of developers to remember every detail every time. Even the best forget or make mistakes. If our tools don't take this into account and protect us from ourselves, we're going to get burned.

tombert 8y ago
I don't disagree with what you're saying; as I've stated, I'm not opposed to having some good libraries to handle dangerous stuff. I personally try not to do SQL with direct string-concatenation, and instead opt for something to sanitize stuff before I actually run anything (at least anything that has the chance of ever touching outside my basement :) ) I just don't like having the libraries forced as part of the full structure, and instead would (typically) prefer them to be functions (or if you're in a Lisp, possibly macros).
- Kalium 8y ago
  I totally agree. I don't like the feeling that comes from being babysat by code that tells me how I need to do everything. But I don't know a better way to guard against all the things I might not think of. I've seen entirely too many cases of people doing something wildly unsafe and reckless because it seemed the easiest to them at the time and their tools didn't handle things for them. Use serialized objects to communicate between systems? Why not? We have Avro schemas, those will keep us safe as we deserialize random data from the network, right? As much as I don't like being treated like a child by a bucket of bits, I also recognize that Clojurian minimalism requires me to think of literally everything. I have to know everything that's dangerous, how it's dangerous, and how to guard against it. That feels like even more load on my brain than being babysat - and I'm a security specialist!
  - tombert 8y ago
    That's fair enough, I'm not really a specialist in anything since I'm (officially) unqualified for everything...I will concede that you might have a point security-wise....but I don't have to like it!

by Kalium 8y ago

tombert 8y ago

I don't disagree with what you're saying; as I've stated, I'm not opposed to having some good libraries to handle dangerous stuff. I personally try not to do SQL with direct string-concatenation, and instead opt for something to sanitize stuff before I actually run anything (at least anything that has the chance of ever touching outside my basement :) ) I just don't like having the libraries forced as part of the full structure, and instead would (typically) prefer them to be functions (or if you're in a Lisp, possibly macros).

Kalium 8y ago
I totally agree. I don't like the feeling that comes from being babysat by code that tells me how I need to do everything. But I don't know a better way to guard against all the things I might not think of. I've seen entirely too many cases of people doing something wildly unsafe and reckless because it seemed the easiest to them at the time and their tools didn't handle things for them. Use serialized objects to communicate between systems? Why not? We have Avro schemas, those will keep us safe as we deserialize random data from the network, right? As much as I don't like being treated like a child by a bucket of bits, I also recognize that Clojurian minimalism requires me to think of literally everything. I have to know everything that's dangerous, how it's dangerous, and how to guard against it. That feels like even more load on my brain than being babysat - and I'm a security specialist!
- tombert 8y ago
  That's fair enough, I'm not really a specialist in anything since I'm (officially) unqualified for everything...I will concede that you might have a point security-wise....but I don't have to like it!