OT: python use in xfce

[Robin Haswell]

Aaron wrote:
> no, but im well aware that theres many python haters here. i just dont
> understand all of this hate for a language unless theyve acctaully
> programmed in it for long periods of time...

No, but there are other viewpoints as well. If Toyota made a car with a faulty braking system 
(obtuse example, it's late) that was killing people, I would "hate" (actually I would "stay the hell 
away from" - applies here) that model, or even that company, on those grounds. Putting that in 
context, as a system admin I've patched too many buffer overflows in trivial software to have a 
positive view of C/C++ in those uses. I dislike that my systems are at risk because people write 
software in low-level languages that make it all too easy to cause these problems. I'm not really 
having a go at those developers or even C itself (because that's stupid), just the general mindset 
that all software should be written in C/C++.

Let's have a quick look at my debian security announces:

http://www.debian.org/security/2006/dsa-1023

Buffer oveflow in Kaffeine. Why was this written in C++? I'm in to guessing here, but I reckon the 
majority of this software is wrappers around gstreamer/other libraries, KDE/QT libs with the bulk of 
the source being "GUI" and "glue". All I'm saying is, if it was written in Python or Mono or 
whatever, it wouldn't be vulnerable to this attack and it would probably be a lot easier to maintain 
and add features to. As it happens it experience a buffer overflow in what is probably one of the 
only bits of network code in the entire app.

One more point before I try to go to bed: I use worship an editor called "Pida", written in Python 
(for Python), that embeds gvim as its editor and bolts on a load of functionality using a proper 
GTK2 interface. It loads maybe 20% slower than gedit but has a heapload more functionality, and it's 
only at 0.3.1. In this respect it's using vim as a library, a library that's dog-old and well 
tested. That's fine. And as a further bonus, when it encounters programming errors I get a traceback 
popup, I click "OK" and carry on editing. I've never experience an unrecoverable error. In my world, 
this is how software should be written. Microsoft knows this, and they gave us .NET.

-Rob