Originally Posted By: JeffS

Which is not to say that I disagree about scary developers. .Net (and Java- and other fancy languages for that matter) have definitely lowered the bar to getting compiled programs working, meaning just about anyone can write something the compiles and runs. Back in the day, if you didn't know what you were doing it was hard to get something running without some skill, much less making it do anything useful. Nowadays the tools are so powerful that it doesn't take much skill to get something running that does basically what you want- the skill comes with writing code that takes into account maintenence and an appropriate level of security- and on initial writing these items aren't valued as they should be. So any old (or young, really) developer will do, and people like me who make noise about it when people are writing crappy code are ignored in the name of getting it done, then stuck with figuring out how to miantain difficult code that has security risks.

But at least I'm not bitter.


I remember the old days. It was extremely easy to write code that could be vulnerable to buffer overruns, reference memory outside the program's address space and otherwise blow up the system. There will always be bad programmers and programmers will always be lazy. It's better to have languages that make it hard for the programmer to blow up the system than to rely on programmers to do the right thing all the time IMO.