Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming

by Peter Seibel

Deutsch: Absolutely. Yes. Programs built in Python and Java—once you get past a certain fairly small scale—have all the same problems except for storage corruption that you have in C or C++. The essence of the problem is that there is no linguistic mechanism for understanding or stating or controlling or reasoning about patterns of information sharing and information access in the system. Passing a pointer and storing a pointer are localized operations, but their consequences are to implicitly create this graph. I'm not even going to talk about multithreaded applications—even in single-threaded applications you have data that's flowing between different parts of the program. You have references that are being propagated to different parts of the program. And even in the best-designed programs, you have these two or three or four different complex patterns of things that are going on and no way to describe or reason about or characterize large units in a way that actually constrains what happens in the small. People have taken runs at this problem. But I don't think there have been any breakthroughs and I don't think there have been any sort of widely accepted or widely used solutions.