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Theriac25

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In C you could have made some 'safe buffer'

No you couldn't've. C is fundamentally unsafe language and people like you should stop pretending it isn't.

Explain Shell 13 years ago

Doesn't seem to support backquotes? For example

    for x in `ls ~/foo`; do echo $x; done
doesn't yield anything remotely interesting.

I disagree. A 182cm (6ft) person can weigh only 82 kg (~180lbs) to be not considered overweight. If you have any amount of muscle and don't have a single digit bodyfat percentage, you're easily overweight according to BMI. And it only gets worse when you get taller. Similarly, short people can be seriously fat and not be considered overweight according to BMI. The exponent in the BMI formula should be larger than 2.

"One of the first things you will notice is how short people there are. The second thing you'll notice is that food portions in restaurants and cafeterias are much larger. Strangely, everybody feels hungry all the time."

This right here is why security will never be mainstream, because consumers value convenience over the ability for their browser not to run arbitrary code.

You say that as if it's a bad a thing.

It took me a while to realize that it didn't mean writing code that ran aboard an airplane, but code that was written while on an airplane. Somehow the latter didn't even cross my mind as something that could be considered impressive.

Huh? Of course it is a feature. My point is that if something as innocent looking as property access can be an arbitrary method call, it may make understanding a piece of code more difficult. From the point of view of debugging existing code, which I've done a lot lately, hiding details that may matter in corner cases is not something that I want the language to encourage.

In fact, it's unclear to me where java might be optimal.

I'd say server side processing of whatever. That's what we use it at work for, and I don't see how any of the mainstream languages would be much, if any, better. Our software has to run on our customers' servers, so portability is of utmost importance since we don't want to need to compile it for random OS's. This rules out languages that need native binaries. Performance is also important, since people don't want to buy bigger machines just because you wrote your software in Python/Ruby/whatever and is 10+ times slower than it needs to be. Also, our software is old enough that C# didn't even exist for many years.