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My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

blog.jonasoberg.net

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Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#51

Post by wyager »

analognoise wrote: post #3

"And we need to adapt our thinking accordingly: we don't need free and open source software and copyleft so that the next generation can hack the Linux kernel; we need it so they can hack a flying car." Jesus, if there was ever anything that shouldn't be developed like the Linux kernel, it is anything in the air large enough to cause damage if it crashes.

The cutting edge of formally verified hard-realtime safety-critical software is academic and open source. I would only want to ride in a flying car if its control code was written by public cooperation and was publicly auditable.

The last thing I want is for people to ride around in missiles powered by Windows Embedded or Java SE Embedded, contracted out from Chevy to some software farm in India, with no public oversight except for the fact that Chevy's lawyers can convince the NHTSA that it satisfies whatever harebrained safety checklist the government came up with.

Avionics is a special case in terms of cost, level of automation, homogeneity of products, and level of pilot expertise, which makes the use of some one-off Ada software Boeing wrote 30 years ago much more reasonable.

Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#52

Post by open_bear »

jhomedall wrote: post #20
daxorid wrote: post #8

Children growing up today won't learn C programming by reading the Linux kernel source code. With any luck, children growing up today won't learn C at all, or at least ONLY for historical understanding. It is an absolute security nightmare. Do we not want the next generation to exclusively use safe languages?

While Rust is extremely promising, there is a ton of C code out there that isn't going away any time soon.

There is a ton of COBOL code out there, and banks are not going to retire those mainframes any time soon :(

Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#53

Post by moosingin3space »

toast0 wrote: post #29
daxorid wrote: post #8

Children growing up today won't learn C programming by reading the Linux kernel source code. With any luck, children growing up today won't learn C at all, or at least ONLY for historical understanding. It is an absolute security nightmare. Do we not want the next generation to exclusively use safe languages?

> Do we not want the next generation to exclusively use safe languages? Someone has to write (and maintain) the safe languages.

Counterexample: Rust compiler is written in Rust.

Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#54

Post by Jtsummers »

gabesullice wrote: post #21

Perhaps I need a history lesson, but I don't think the kernel developers 25 years ago had any idea that some kid would be learning C through the code they wrote. I also doubt the engineers at Texas Instruments thought that enabling programs on my TI-84 would spawn my or many others' passion for programming. It was simply coincidence paired with curiosity. I think curious children of the right mindset will find the op…

Actually, I think programming on the TI-84 was deliberately intended to get people interested. Math textbooks from the 1980s and 1990s included BASIC snippets at the end of chapters/sections (in the US). The dialects varied, but porting was a trivial task.

In the 1980s there was a push for programming as part of the standard curriculum. Whether it was TI's corporate intent, or motivated by satisfying educators' goals, they made programming available on their calculators quite deliberately.

Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#55

Post by tannhaeuser »

daxorid wrote: post #8

Children growing up today won't learn C programming by reading the Linux kernel source code. With any luck, children growing up today won't learn C at all, or at least ONLY for historical understanding. It is an absolute security nightmare. Do we not want the next generation to exclusively use safe languages?

Thing is, for understanding why Rust is the way it is, you need to suffer through memory leaks and eg. buffer overflows, segfaults, lack of strict typing, etc.

Same with most frameworks I know, regardless of where in the stack.

That's why I believe Java is a bad educational language, and Donald Knuth uses MIX assembly in his books.

Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#56

Post by bjornlouser »

blowski wrote: post #25
inetknght wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly how I got into writing software. First, I got bored with playing the same scenarios in Command & Conquer over and over. So I learned to make my own. Then I got tired of some of those hacking utilities crashing (all the time!) and said I could do it better myself. So I taught myself to write software. 20 years later... I see people being hired who have no clue how things work under the hood and it make…

I hear this argument all the time and it makes no sense to me. If I hire somebody to put my Ikea furniture together, I'm not disappointed to learn they're not a skilled carpenter. When I hire a children's entertainer, I'd be surprised to learn they were an extremely talented musician. There are people out there who know how everything works under the hood, and that's great. But they're typically expensive and unavail…

"If I hire somebody to put my Ikea furniture together... "

talk about snobbery ;)

Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#57

Post by frabbit »

I cannot think of anything worse than flying cars. The noise, visual pollution, lack of privacy, waste of energy and sheer lack of imagination of finding a new way to live on this planet makes me grind my teeth. I hope they are easily hackable so that they can all be programmed to stay on the ground for ever.

Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#58

Post by Hydraulix989 »

Jtsummers wrote: post #54
gabesullice wrote: post #21

Perhaps I need a history lesson, but I don't think the kernel developers 25 years ago had any idea that some kid would be learning C through the code they wrote. I also doubt the engineers at Texas Instruments thought that enabling programs on my TI-84 would spawn my or many others' passion for programming. It was simply coincidence paired with curiosity. I think curious children of the right mindset will find the op…

Actually, I think programming on the TI-84 was deliberately intended to get people interested. Math textbooks from the 1980s and 1990s included BASIC snippets at the end of chapters/sections (in the US). The dialects varied, but porting was a trivial task. In the 1980s there was a push for programming as part of the standard curriculum. Whether it was TI's corporate intent, or motivated by satisfying educators' goals…

As a completely irrelevant aside, I quickly moved onto Z80 assembly when I was a kid because TI-BASIC was so slow and limited. It was amazing getting sprites drawn at real-time rates.

Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#59

Post by monksy »

blowski wrote: post #25
inetknght wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly how I got into writing software. First, I got bored with playing the same scenarios in Command & Conquer over and over. So I learned to make my own. Then I got tired of some of those hacking utilities crashing (all the time!) and said I could do it better myself. So I taught myself to write software. 20 years later... I see people being hired who have no clue how things work under the hood and it make…

I hear this argument all the time and it makes no sense to me. If I hire somebody to put my Ikea furniture together, I'm not disappointed to learn they're not a skilled carpenter. When I hire a children's entertainer, I'd be surprised to learn they were an extremely talented musician. There are people out there who know how everything works under the hood, and that's great. But they're typically expensive and unavail…

It's all about craftsmanship, and it's about the depth of knowledge. You can hire most people to build a car from a kit. However, you also have to accept blame from getting someone with a shallow understanding of the car when something goes wrong on the car.

> But they're typically expensive and unavailable.

Because the value of the knowledge is extremely high and the market is flooded with people that can do the job of creation but not solve the problems that arise out of it.

> why is that a bad thing?

TL;DR Short term, that's ok, long term: they have no understanding of what they're truly doing and the consequences as a result. You should accept responsibility for that.

Re: My Kid Will Never Hack Linux

#60

Post by bigtunacan »

synack wrote: post #11

Games. The first computers kids will start to wonder about are the ones they're using to play games, be it a game console, tablet, or PC. Modding comes first, slightly tweaking the game to add a new item, map, or remove some annoying limitation. The truly curious and persistent kids will eventually want to learn how to make their own games. This is where you'll find the next generation of programmers.

Definitely games. This is what got me first hacking when I was a kid. Now as a parent, my oldest daughter (now 13), has been hacking on things for a few years now. First it was with Legos, then Minecraft modding, and most recently she's been trying to hack Movie Star Planet.

Believe me; I was quite shocked we she came to me out of the blue and was like, "Hey dad; can you come take a look at this? I'm having a problem with Charles and I thought you could help." I was thinking, "Ok, I don't know who Charles is, but I'll listen to her." Turns out she was referring to Charles the web debugging proxy (https://www.charlesproxy.com/documentation/proxying/ssl-prox...) and that she was doing traffic analysis on her games to see if she could hack the data being passed around; not all that much different from Burp which I use for security auditing some of my apps at work.

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