Being safe on the internet (was Re: Here we go again - ISP DPI, but is it interception?)

[John Wilson]

On 7 August 2010 10:47, Ian Batten <igb at batten.eu.org> wrote:
> So, if I'm three weeks from starting a PhD in which the production of a
> large slab of secure code (let us gloss over whether that's formally secure
> or pragmatically secure), what toolchain should I use?  I'm guessing my
> favoured "first to reach for" tools at my advanced age of C and Perl aren't
> cool, C++ horrifies me aesthetically, Java is dull.
>
> I think it's time for a Lisp revival.


Well there's Erlang which is having something of a revival.

There's something to be said for the JVM if you wish to write secure
code (all array access is bound checked, you can to a certain extent
enforce tighter security than you get out of the box - disallowing
introspection, for example). Class loaders can give you some
Capability like behaviour. Garbage collection helps too. There are
quite a few options for languages on the JVM.

Not very interesting (implementations of existing languages)

JRuby
Jython

More interesting (languages specifically designed to run on the JVM)
Groovy
Clojure
Scala

There are tons more but most of the rest are toys or dead (and
Jython's looking a bit peaky at the moment)

If you insist on trying to prove that Lisp is not dead then take a
look at Clojure (it's a Lisp dialect).


John Wilson