Let’s assume that there is a discussion going on on the Internet about programming languages. One of the design points that come up is a garbage collector. One participant mentions the advantages of garbage collection with something like this:
Garbage collectors are nice and save a lot of work. If your application does not have strict latency requirements, not having to care about memory management is liberating and can improve developer efficiency by a lot.
This is a fairly neutral statement that most people would agree with, even if they work on code that has strict real time requirements. Yet, inevitably, someone will present this counterpoint.
No! If you have dangling references memory is never freed and you have to fix that by doing manual memory management anyway . Garbage collectors do not magically fix all bugs.
If you read through the sentences carefully you’ll notice that every asserted statement in it is true. That is what makes it so frustrating to argue against. Most people with engineering backgrounds are quite willing to admit they are wrong when presented with evidence that their statements are not correct. This does not cover everyone, of course, as some people are quite willing to violently disagree with any and all facts that are in conflict with their pre-held beliefs. We’ll ignore those people for the purpose of this post.
While true, that single sentence ignores all of the larger context of the issue, which contains points like the following:
- Dangling reference out of memory errors are rare (maybe 1 in 10 programs?) whereas regular memory bugs like use-after -free, double free, off by one errors etc are very common (823 – in every program.
- Modern GCs have very good profilers, finding dangling references is a lot easier than debugging stack corruptions.
- Being able create things on a whim and just drop them to the floor makes programmers a lot more productive than forcing them to micromanage the complete life cycle of every single resource.
- Even if you encounter a dangling reference issue, fixing it probably takes less time than would have gone to fixing memory corruption issues in a GCless version of the same app.
In brief, the actual sentence is true but misses the entire point of the comment they are replying to. This is sadly common on Internet debates. Let’s see some examples.
Computer security
A statement like this:
Using HTTPS on all web traffic is good for security and anonymity.
might be countered with something like this:
That provides no real security, if the NSA want your data they will break into your apartment and get it.
This statement is again absolutely true. On the other hand if you are not the leader of a nation state or do regular business with international drug cartels, you are unlikely to be the target of a directed NSA offensive.
If you think that this is a stupid point that nobody would ever make, I agree with you completely. I have also seen it used in the real world. I wish I hadn’t.
Bugs are caused by incompetents
High level programming languages are nice.
Programming languages that guard against buffer overruns is great for security and ease of development.
But not for everyone.
You can achieve the exact same thing in C, you just have to be careful.
This is again true. If every single developer on a code base is being % focused and % careful % of the time , then bug free code is possible. Reality has shown time and time again that it is not possible, human beings are simply not capable of operating flawlessly for extended periods of time.
Yagni? What Yagni?
There’s the simple.
Processing text files with Python is really nice and simple.
And not so simple.
Python is a complete joke, it will fail hard when you need to process ten million files a second on an embedded microcontroller using at most 2 k of RAM.
Yes. Yes it does. In that use case it would be the wrong choice. You are absolutely correct. Thank you for your insight, good sir, here is a shiny solid gold medal to commemorate your important contribution to this discussion.
What could be the cause of this?
The one thing that school trains you for is that being right is what matters. If you get the answers right in your test, then you get a good grade. Get them wrong and you don’t. Maybe this frame of mind “sticks on” once you leave school, especially given that most people who post these kinds of comments seem to be from the “smarter” end of the spectrum (personal opinion, not based on any actual research). In the real world being right is not a merit by itself. In any debate being right is important, of course, but the much more important feature is being relevant . That requires understanding the wider context and possibly admitting that something that is the most important thing in the world to you personally, might be completely irrelevant for the issue at hand.
Being right is easy. Being relevant is extremely difficult.
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