[E-Lang] E FAQ

[Marc Stiegler]

> >Thus, E seems to be intended to make it
> >easier to do the right thing.
>
> That's certainly true, and I would claim, more so than any system for
> expressing secure computation I know of.  I think it could also be an
> unparalleled teaching language for security and distributed security
concepts.

My studies of the Java Security Manager lead me to believe that E makes it
enormously easier to do the right thing. Which leads me back to a mantra I
started repeating 20 years ago, as a youth in the defense industry, when I
spent half my life fighting for exceptions to the military standards for
software development:

If you want people to do something the right way, you must make the right
way the easy way.

I have seen virtually nothing in the intervening 20 years to suggest this
statement is wrong :-) In particular, computer scientists succeeded in
banishing the GOTO statement after decades of holy war, not by banishing the
GOTO statement from the languages we use, but rather by creating the
constructs that made it easier to do better things, from if-elseif-else to
try/catch. GOTO was banished from languages only after the war was over and
no one cared any more.

Combining the enormous improvement in security ease in E, with the belief
that only with easiness comes success, I draw as my own conclusion that
security will only arise when languages like E have "won".

--marcs