strangest systems I've sent email from

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Liam Proven

    > There's the not-remotely-safe kinda-sorta C in a web browser,
    > Javascript.

Love the rant, which I mostly agree with (_especially_ that one). A couple of
comments:

    > So they still have C like holes and there are frequent patches and
    > updates to try to make them able to retain some water for a short time,
    > while the "cyber criminals" make hundreds of millions.

It's not clear to me that a 'better language' is going to get rid of that,
because there will always be bugs (and the bigger the application, and the
more it gets changed, the more there will be). The vibe I get from my
knowledge of security is that it takes a secure OS, running on hardware that
enforces security, to really fix the problem. (Google "Roger Schell".)

    > The Lisp Machines and Smalltalk boxes lost the workstation war. Unix
    > won, and as history is written by the victors

Custom hardware for running LISP lost (not sure about Smalltalk, don't know
much about it), I am quite sure, mostly because 'mainstream' CPUs got so much
faster/cheaper, because of the volume. I saw this happening in the AI Lab at
MIT: when you could run LISP on a workstation with a vanilla CPU much faster
than a specialized LISP processor, that's all she wrote. (That effect killed
all sorts of things, not just LISP machines, of course.)

	Noel