[link|http://darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=93335&WT.svl=column1_1|http://darkreading.c...&WT.svl=column1_1]

At the scientifically rigorous USENIX security conference in August 2005, I caught up in the hallway with Butler Lampson after his excellent keynote talk. Butler is a legendary scientist, and he has done plenty of great pontificating about security, privacy, software, and technology. Like many superior computer scientists, Butler now works for Microsoft Research.

I asked Butler why it was that Longhorn (Vista's codename at the time) was not built out of a type-safe language like those available for the .NET framework. He shook his head in dismay and decried the fact that we had let another great opportunity to make a huge impact on computer security pass us by. He said that opportunities like this come only once every decade or so in his experience and that he had seen four attempts to cause widescale adoption of type-safe languages founder on the rocks throughout his career.

The problem, it turns out, is that the .NET builders did not give much thought to providing many of the essential basic building blocks that operating systems construction crews need for their work. Interpreted code has some minor performance issues as well (note that there are many ways to overcome this often overly shrill critique). But the main problem was that the Microsoft OS guys are big C++ users. Getting them to switch over to C# was for these reasons not in the cards.
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Not that I think the type systems of Java or C# are any good, but they are a little better than C/C++.

I like type systems that work. Specifically, I like dynamic type systems. I like that you can look at any set of bits in a Smalltalk executable and know exactly WTF you are looking at (because of bit tagging).

I dislike shit like C++ which cheerfully tosses all type information into the bit bucket at compile time.

C does this too, but C is a useful tool that is hardware oriented (a sometimes necessary evil) but Smalltalk (and hopefully all application development languages) is a tool designed to be human oriented (as evidenced by an ongoing discussion about array indexing on the Squeak list where in the expression

1 to: 5 do: [:n | ...]

n will take on the values { 1, 2, ... 5} rather than the machine oriented C where to get that set you say

for(i=1; i < 6; ++i)
).

So I like type systems that are helpful. I dislike typing a lot of mumbo jumbo just so the compiler can throw it away.