Danger!
If you are a programmer, you already know that your job is rife with danger. Thankfully, there are plenty of other wise programmers out looking out for you, writing articles about how dangerous various language features are. These programmers clearly know better than you do, and it would be smart of you to heed their advice without thinking for yourself.
For instance, everyone knows manual memory management is
CONSIDERED DANGEROUS!!!
Did you know that if a programmer forgets to deallocate memory it creates a leak? Memory leaks are a huge problem, resulting in application slowdown, instability, and crashes. But if a programmer deallocates some memory twice the heap will be instantly corrupted and the problem will eventually crash. The programmer has to be exact when using memory - and we all know programmers cannot be trusted with that responsibility. Therefore you should always use garbage collected programming languages even when its not appropriate for your specific task.
You may find it shocking to learn that many programmers in this day and age still use pointers, which everyone knows are
CONSIDERED DANGEROUS!!!
Did you know that billions of times each and every day a pointer comes right the edge of a buffer? One more step and that pointer will refer to invalid or uninitialized memory! If that happens chaos will ensue! And what, you may ask, is preventing that pointer from veering off into the danger zone? A programmer! An untrustworthy beard sporting ironic t-shirt wearing programmer! And don’t event get me started on null pointers. Just thinking about it makes me want to throw up.
Plus pointers are sharp. You could poke out an eye.
I could go on and on. Gotos? Spaghetti code is
CONSIDERED DANGEROUS!!!
Recursion? Blowing your stack is
CONSIDERED DANGEROUS!!!
These are all well known sources of danger, but you may be alarmed to know I have found even more. And some of these might surprise even the most grizzeled vet. For instance, I have recently learned that integers are
CONSIDERED DANGEROUS!!!
Yes, even those banal bastions of arithmetic are a source of constant worry. Not only can integers overflow, but they can underflow as well. These type of bugs are particularly dangerous because they can be difficult to track down and can result in all sorts of incorrect behavior. Do you honestly believe that most programmers are prepared to deal with this edge cases? I don’t. Not for a minute.
But this is only the tip of the iceburg. Integers are used to represent all sorts of information, from financial figures to social security numbers. One miscalculation and users can lose untold amounts of data. There is no known programming language or technique that can assist programmers in preventing these types of errors. Since integers cannot be used safely they should not be used at all.
If we are throwing out integers, we should probably get rid of loops while we are at it as well. Ever see an application hang because of an infinite loop? Its a terrible site to behold. Conditional statements? Implements of destruction. And this brings me to the ultimate conclusion:
PROGRAMMING IS CONSIDERED DANGEROUS!
