[COFF] [TUHS] Re: Buffer overflow found/fixed in v4 tape ;)

[segaloco via COFF]

On Monday, January 5th, 2026 at 13:00, Larry McVoy via COFF <coff at tuhs.org> wrote:

> But I'm sympathetic to the people that say they need the guard rails.
> As an old school programmer, I'm baffled that you need them, I find it
> sad. As a realistic person, bring on the guard rails. And I'm happy

Long musings on guardrails and accessibility incoming...

It's 2026 and most of the code that passes through my fingers outside of my day job is still assembly (mostly 6502).  Watching trend after trend go by while I plink around with bare-metal microcontrollers is amusing.  At the end of the day, I recognize that *what is being done* is noble and good, I can hardly find fault in anyone trying in earnest to make programming safer (and thereby more accessible).  The problem I have is *how it is being done*.  Some languages and environments have given up on the inquisitive, risk-taking hacker and pander instead to the rapid-fire vibe coder.  Is this a problem?

Not necessarily IMO.  Just like languages have proliferated for different use-cases from a technical perspective (systems vs. industrial control vs. business vs. science, highly parallel vs. hard-real-time, so on and so forth), I feel they proliferate for different skill levels and goals.  Sure if you're an expert fiber artist trying to sew a beautiful dress, childrens safety scissors seem like a joke.  But if you're a kid who has until then only had the option of ripping your paper by hand, some crappy little Fiskars are a godsend.

To get back to the how, I worry about folks getting pigeonholed, about an easier language being treated as an end-all-be-all and a permanent investment.  You learn to ride a fixed gear with training wheels, then upgrade to no training wheels, then to a multi-speed (then to a motorcycle).  In my own day job, I don't really see any kind of progression like this encouraged.  Part of it is logistics, sure, can't have people switching languages all the time.  But still, the languages we use are "sold" on their ease of use, but I have had multiple occasions of cursing the fact that cool, I know this stuff, but I've myself graduated to languages that require much more finesse and thought but reward me richly, and I cannot enjoy the rich reward of having found a better way of doing something because it can't be expressed adequately in the "easy" language.  It doesn't matter to my professional career right now because the least common denominator is the programmers on the team that would be lost without C# and .NET (not a dig, but a sympathetic understanding of being where I was in my own past).

What this speaks to in my mind is a benefit for increasing the interoperability of different languages and environments.  Sure plenty of libraries and systems have binding methods to make your C function, say, available to your FORTRAN programs, but these mechanisms tend to be hit or miss depending on the implementation.

Just as we are entering an age of mote automated translation, there are now devices that'll do the sci-fi-esque live translation stuff in bot directions, I have to wonder, is interoperability between programming systems going to get more or less attention as time goes on?  I think there are some strong cases to be made for "multi-lingual" programming, not least of which is more "upwards mobility" inspiring programmers to get better at their craft holistically rather than becoming yoked under the very languages that gave them success in the first place.  All in all, I simply wish there was more of a trend of "upgrading languages" more regularly, taking on more precise or more expressive vehicles as one goes, rather than having to invest in a specific language and then forever be beholden to or influenced by its specific "accent".

- Matt G.