White House urges developers to dump C and C++::Biden administration calls for developers to embrace memory-safe programing languages and move away from those that cause buffer overflows and other memory access vulnerabilities.
I’m not sure what to think about this. It’s bizarre, the White House making any recommendations on programming languages.
They’re definitely not seen as an authority in this field. Why would anyone care what recommendation they make? And so why make one at all?
There’s two possibilities
The unlikely one is that it’s support for a make work program for the millions of programmers who can’t find junior positions either because they don’t know how to work with pointers, massive fundamental blocks of the software required to run everything are already mature and only need ongoing contract support from senior developers who have memory unsafe techniques down pat or they’re being squeezed out of the job market by gpts bad code which is free compared to their bad code which costs money.
The more likely option is that it’s a move to exert downward pressure on developer wages by pushing everyone to languages that generative ai has an easier time with. If the language is memory safe the schizophrenic computer can’t cause a memory leak when someone copy/pastes its code into critical infrastructure libraries.
But hey, no more buffer underruns, right? Based White House?
They’re definitely not seen as an authority in this field. Why would anyone care what recommendation they make?
It’s possible that they are acting on the advice of advisors who are authorities in this field.
And so why make one at all?
I expect it’s because information and industrial security are components of national security, which is of great concern to them, and those things depend on software.
I’m not surprised to see this, given that state-sponsored electronic attacks are on the rise these days.
This is exactly why people sound sophomoric when they say “lobbying needs to go!” There are some drastic problems with lobbying as it is allowed now, but the last thing we need is the government regulating things they know nothing about without the input of experts. On top of that, it’s nonsense that I can’t pass my local councilman on the street and stop and push them to spend more time addressing important issues like climate change.
I don’t think your argument quite holds up. The directionality is important. It’s true that the government can’t always know about technical things directly, but I think it’s fine for the government to be expected to know which experts they need to consult, and for that process not to just be open to everyone (which just means more open to those with more money).
It’s important to remember that the argument against lobbying isn’t about the broadest sense of the word “lobbying”, but rather about corporations and other moneyed interests having unfair and unhealthy influence over the laws that govern everyone else.
The people who decry lobbying probably agree with you; they’re just using the word in an implicitly narrow context.
