When does technology pass from being a tool to being a crutch? (2009)
4 points by spc476
4 points by spc476
It seems odd to use the fact that Wordpress is a buggy exploitable mess (one of the links in "resulting code") as an argument that using dynamic typing results in bad code considering the fact that you're speaking in favor of assembly, which is a language that will absolutely happily let you write a sequence of floats to memory and then reinterpret it as a string, or as a sequence of integers, or as a memory address, or as executable code, or as...
All I can say, is that in my experience (I used to work at several web hosting companies back in the late 1990s/early 2000s, up until 2009 when I wrote that post), that with one exception every time we got hacked, it was tracked back to a PHP script. Yes, I do admit to liking assembly, and yes, what I said might come across as being a gatekeeper ("Thou shalt know Assembly before you can program for money"), but if the only thing you got from the post is a hypocritical view of programming, then ... I don't know what to say.
Also, the post in question is 16 years old at this point. Guess I should have updated it with my current view point on PHP vs. Assembly?
The article makes the mistake of defining "technology" too narrowly - laptops, GUIs, keyboards. In reality, technology is a great deal more encompassing, and I reckon that since we must eat at least some food cooked, we're an obligate technology-as-crutch species with fire as the technology and crutch. You just wait until the successor species requires C-sections.
This is a good reminder that questions about what developers “should” be able to do or know without the assistance of tech have been around for a long time