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.

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.

    • Pennomi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      873·
      7 months ago

      I think that’s the point. You can’t trust the average developer to do things safely. And remember, half of all programmers are even worse than average.

        • Pennomi@lemmy.worldEnglish
          22·
          7 months ago

          The word “average“ can mean many things, for example, mean, median, mode, or even things like “within 1 standard deviation from the mean”.

          I was using it strictly as the mean which divides the population exactly in half.

        • Pennomi@lemmy.worldEnglish
          31·
          7 months ago

          The mean is in the center of the bell curve, so I’m not sure what your point is.

          • thisfro@slrpnk.net
            2·
            7 months ago

            Average is the mean (i.e. sum of all “skill” divided by the amount of programmers)

            What they were thinking of is the median (50th percentile = 0.5 quantile), which splits the group in two equal sized groups.

            For a bell curve, they are the same values. But think of the example of average incomes: 9 people have an income of 10$, one has an income of 910$. The average income is 100$ ((10*9+910)/10). The median is basically 10 however.

            • Bademantel@feddit.de
              4·
              7 months ago

              The distribution of skill in humans, for various tasks and abilities, can often be approximated by a normal distribution. In that case, as you know, the mean is equal to the average.

              • burlemarx
                1·
                7 months ago

                Actually, in order to test your assumption, you’d need to quantitatively measure skill, which per se is something already problematic, but you’d also need to run a statistical test to confirm the distribution is a normal/Gaussian distribution. People always forget the latter and often produce incorrect statistical inferences.

    • u_tamtam@programming.dev
      61·
      7 months ago

      Or rather a Dunning Kruger issue: seniors having spent a significant time architecturing and debugging complex applications tend to be big proponents for things like rust.