4 ms·

You feel vindicated over this vacuous comment article? Let me sum it up for you: "It turns out if I set a safety variable, then unset it in a way that most of m

You feel vindicated over this vacuous comment article? Let me sum it up for you: "It turns out if I set a safety variable, then unset it in a way that most of my audience won't recognize as assignment, I get votes up on hackernews." Cultural awareness of read-time evaluation is as frustratingly absent now as it has always been; same as strcpy vs. strncpy. The only difference now is that we have increasingly more programmers with very little experience in charge of large software projects.

pjungwir 14y ago
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.
- KirinDave 14y ago
  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.
  - abp 14y ago
    This.
  - pjungwir 14y ago
    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.
    - KirinDave 14y ago
      > 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.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]

pjungwir 14y ago

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.

KirinDave 14y ago
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.
- abp 14y ago
  This.
- pjungwir 14y ago
  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.
  - KirinDave 14y ago
    > 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.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]