"I do not imagine a world with fewer exploitable bugs.
I imagine a world in which much less is at risk to most bugs."

-Mark Miller, on Capability based approaches to security.

I liked this paper about how CAP 'doesn't mean what you think it means'. Not that it has all sunk into my brain, enough, yet.

'Our neo-Piagetian perspective leads us to view the curriculum for programming as comprising two dimensions. On one dimension are the nuts and bolts of how programming languages work. That dimension is emphasised in today’s classroom. The other and more neglected dimension comprises the skills for reasoning about programs, sometimes referred to as the notional machine (du Boulay, 1989), but which we think of in neo-Piagetian terms. This dimension is often not explicitly taught, especially in the first few weeks learning to program. We believe that, with every increment along the “nuts and bolts” dimension (i.e. with every new programming construct taught), all the neo-Piagetian stages of reasoning need to be explicitly reprised.'

Things like MISRA C make me sad. I wish we were all using better things, be it Ada, or formal methods, or whatever.

Hah! My horrible (truly, truly horrible) code. I mean, the graph output was nice compared to what it replaced, but when I went to rewrite it later (a project that never got fully released, oh well) I wanted to go back in time and back-handed slap myself in the face.

https://metacpan.org/pod/Bio::GMOD::Blast::Graph

P.S. I am a little annoyed that the list could be interpreted as meaning I am not "first author" when in fact I wrote pretty much literally all the code, and was the one who had the idea for the whole project in the first place. Oh well. :-)

I want

"Abstraction without visualization"

to become a software engineering complaint mantra along the lines of

"Taxation without representation"

as an evil to be abhorred.

Abstraction (in the software development sense) kills, in the "news at 11!" sense.

Of course, the lack of it does, too.