[E-Lang] what is good about E?

[Richard Uhtenwoldt]

Marc Stiegler writes:

>in looking for a niche market
>where the leverage is both greatest and easiest to explain, I still think
>the best niche to spend the tiny amount of marketing resources we have is in
>the security-concerned domain.

I'm not disagreeing with you, just want you to be aware of the danger of
painting yourself as little paranoid.

When I started reading the Eros and E web sites about 2 years ago, I was
repeatedly turned off by some of the sales pitches that stress security.

Because I had been adversely conditioned by previous run-ins with anal
cops, homeowners obsessed with burgulars, nerds proud of having
mastering vast amount of tedious Unix security arcana and people who are
plain paranoid, my reaction to any talk that puts an unusually high
stress on security tend to be to simply stop paying attention.
Thus is never paid attention long enough to realize how cool cap
is.

What finally got me excited about cap (a month ago) was my realizing
that cap techniques actually remove the obligation for the programmer to
do much of the tedious thinking about security --and the resulting
"combinatorial code explosion"-- that Unix and Java developers of secure
apps are forced to do.  Specifically, Rees's 1995 paper illustrates this
point via 3 or 4 very short examples (10 times shorter than the annoted
eChat program and written in a language I already knew) of actual
runnable Scheme code.

        Richard