Re: Faulty languages and Liability

[Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>]

Mike Silva wrote:
> A better analogy is when your car catches fire while driving down the road.

But viruses which take advantage of buffer overflows and such are
like spreading oil on the road to make cars crash. The manufacturer
can very easily argue that the program works fine in normal use, and
that intricately formed attack vectors are not part of that.

It has already been mentioned that there are many other points of
vulnerability than buffer overruns. There is cross-scripting, /tmp
race conditions, symbolic link race conditions, and a host of other
stuff, none of which will be *automatically* caught be using Ada.

So the argument boils down to the usual about Ada being better,
but that doesn't really bring product liability into it.

>>If I was sued becuase I didn't use Ada,
> Nobody is proposing that.

Sure they are, when an Ada advocate starts suggesting product liability
lawsuits.

> What, exactly, were the "results of using Ada" on the Ariane 5?  I
> know you don't like it when people resort to stupid anti-C++ comments
> to make a point, so don't resort to stupid anti-Ada comments to make
> your point, if you want to be taken seriously on cla.

I wouldn't resort to stupid anti-Ada comments on c.l.a, but if someone
was trying to use lawsuits to force me to abandon the one true way and
start using Ada instead, you can be sure that I would use every method
at my disposal to fight that, including launching unfair attacks against
Ada. I would resort to stupid anti-Ada comments with the jury.

The point of Ariane 5 is that the rocket blew up even though the software
was written in Ada. This very much weakens the arguments that could be
made that one should have used Ada instead of [lang], since there is a
spectacular failure which demonstrates that writing in Ada is no panacea.
So we just get back to the usual arguments about why one language is
better than another, but there isn't much there for liability suits to
claim that one should have used a different language.