Picture Me Coding Erik Aker and Mike Mull

This is part II of our Standing on the Shoulders of Giants episode about Edsger Dijkstra, the greatest philosopher of our field.

Instead of using social media, Dijkstra would dash off hot takes on his typewriter or his pen and in this episode we cover various of his opinions and essays. You'll hear him say stuff like, "Java sucks" and it's "cowardly to call our errors 'bugs'."

Here are some links to the material we discussed:
On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science (1988)Letter protesting U Texas switch to Java from Haskell (2001)“How do we tell truths that might hurt?” (1975)“On the Foolishness of ‘Natural Language Programming” (Video) “Lecture: Reasoning About Programs - Solving 2 problems using programing” - 1990 

This week we talked about the greatest philosopher of our field: Edsger Dijkstra. Most software engineers will immediately recall Dijkstra's Algorithm, for finding the shortest path between two nodes in a graph, but Dijkstra's work covers a large range of topics over 5 decades, from code quality to complexity to concurrent programming, and programming languages.

In this episode, we talked specifically about the following works, including the original paper where Dijkstra first published what we now call "Dijkstra's algorithm":
Notes on structured programmingSolution of a problem in concurrent program control (1965)Two Problems in Connexion with Graphs (1959)Go To Statement Considered HarmfulThis episode is part I of our Dijkstra discussion. We'll be back next week for more.

A week ago a developer in San Francisco named Andres Freund found a backdoor in SSH which would grant some shadowy figure access to Linux machines running the latest version of a library called liblzma.  Even more incredibly, there were various semi-anonymous figures clamoring for inclusion of this compromised version of liblzma into the latest version of various Linux distros. 

This entire scheme had been underway for over three years before it fell apart under Freund's scrutiny and attention from the broader software industry.

This week Mike gives us a breakdown of the exploit and we talk about the fallout from this backdoor which took advantage of an overworked and vulnerable open-source maintainer. 

As Mike puts it, the story is "bonkers".

To read more about it, check out these articles: 
The Verge: “How one volunteer stopped a backdoor from exposing Linux systems worldwide” Wired: “The Mystery of ‘Jia Tan,’ the XZ Backdoor Mastermind” TuxCare: “A Deep Dive on the xz Compromise” Timeline from Boehs.org: https://boehs.org/node/everything-i-know-about-the-xz-backdoor

Along with our friend Bob Farzin, we visit upon the sleeping body of AI three ghosts this week: one for the past, one for the present, and one for the future. We make a sincere attempt to haunt the crap out of LLMs like GPT, Claude, and Github Copilot and to give them a truly spooky, creeped out feeling as they look upon what they're doing to their industry.

What skills will we need in the future if AI writes all of our code for us? What's going to happen to our tools, our programming languages, our industry? Will we have to go to more meetings?

Erik is a lot more nervous about the future than the calmly reflective Mike and Bob, but we'll do our best this week to predict the future.

In our industry there are myriad examples of companies behaving unethically, so what power do we have as software engineers to uphold ethical principles and resist bad behavior? In this episode Mike and Erik look at adopting a software engineering code of ethics, relying primarily on the ACM's Code of Ethics as a foundational set of guidelines for ethical and professional behavior.

Also, we're not really known for this but it's worth mentioning that this episode may include some hot takes? I guess I would say that these takes are at least a little warmer than usual.

Mike's music choice this week is The Past is Still Alive by Hurray For The Riff Raff, while Erik talked about his travails with DNS. 

Oh, by the way, if you want to email us, the email address is working now(!) and we can be reached over at podcast@picturemecoding.com

Mike's out this week so Erik went into his backyard and talked about famous Naturalists while birds chirped in the background. It's short and unexpected!