Tag: Emacs

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The Java world had an… inter­est­ing week­end when secu­ri­ty researchers revealed on December 9 a vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty in the pop­u­lar Apache Log4j 2 soft­ware library for record­ing and debug­ging events. Systems as diverse as Amazon Web Services, Apple iCloud, and the Minecraft video game could be exploit­ed to run arbi­trary code on a serv­er mere­ly by send­ing a specially-​crafted string of text. Information tech­nol­o­gy pro­fes­sion­als have been scram­bling ever since the ini­tial dis­clo­sure to patch, upgrade, recon­fig­ure, or oth­er­wise pro­tect affect­ed servers. It’s bad, and past unpatched vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties like this have been respon­si­ble for the expo­sure of mil­lions of people’s sen­si­tive data.

Many Perl appli­ca­tions use the similarly-​named and ‑designed Log::Log4perl library, and the good news is that as far as I can tell the lat­ter doesn’t suf­fer from the type of vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty described above. This doesn’t mean poorly-​written or ‑con­fig­ured Perl-​based sys­tems are immune to all exploits, just this par­tic­u­lar one. You should be safe to con­tin­ue using Log4perl unless some­one has delib­er­ate­ly con­fig­ured it oth­er­wise, and in fact, my work uses it extensively.

You might be sur­prised to read me sug­gest­ing a log­ging frame­work after writ­ing mul­ti­ple arti­cles espous­ing the Perl step debug­ger as an alter­na­tive. Log4perl devel­op­er Mike Schilli’s 2002 intro­duc­tion to the pack­age for Perl.com came down on the oppo­site side of the argu­ment. It can seem like one of those pro­gram­mer reli­gious issues like tabs vs. spaces, vim vs. Emacs, or Linux vs. Windows. (For the record, the cor­rect answers are spaces, BBEdit, and macOS. 😉)

But in this case, you can and should have the best of both worlds—logging at dif­fer­ent lev­els to appro­pri­ate des­ti­na­tions while still drop­ping into the inter­ac­tive debug­ger when you need to do some­thing trick­i­er like exam­ine pro­gram state or tweak a data struc­ture on the fly. I use both tech­niques and only empha­size the advo­ca­cy of step debug­ging because it’s under­stood less.

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Ten years ago Rudolf Winestock wrote The Lisp Curse, an essay that ​“attempt[ed] to rec­on­cile the pow­er of the Lisp pro­gram­ming lan­guage with the inabil­i­ty of the Lisp com­mu­ni­ty to repro­duce their pre-AI Winter achievements.”

His con­clu­sion? The pow­er and expres­sive­ness of Lisp have con­spired to keep its devel­op­ers indi­vid­u­al­ly pro­duc­tive, but col­lec­tive­ly unable to orga­nize their work into com­plete, stan­dard­ized, well-​documented, ‑test­ed, and ‑main­tained pack­ages that they could coa­lesce into inter­op­er­a­ble and widely-​adopted solu­tions. Everything from object sys­tems to types to asyn­chro­nous non-​blocking pro­gram­ming and con­cur­ren­cy is up for grabs and has mul­ti­ple com­pet­ing implementations.

These social effects have doomed Lisp to also-​ran sta­tus in an indus­try where ​“employ­ers much pre­fer that work­ers be fun­gi­ble, rather than max­i­mal­ly pro­duc­tive.” Free tool­ing sup­port has lagged; although Emacs can be hacked end­less­ly to do any­thing, there is no out-​of-​the-​box inte­grat­ed devel­op­ment envi­ron­ment or batteries-​included defaults to imme­di­ate­ly ease new pro­gram­mers into their job.

Does this all sound famil­iar to Perl developers?

Perl is renowned for its expres­sive capa­bil­i­ties, enshrined in the TIMTOWTDI (There Is More Than One Way To Do It) design prin­ci­ple. Stories abound of the pro­duc­tiv­i­ty achieved by Perl pro­gram­mers stitch­ing togeth­er mod­ules from CPAN with their own code. Select an object sys­tem (or don’t), maybe throw in an excep­tion han­dler (or don’t), and you too can have a code­base that fel­low devel­op­ers cri­tique for not fol­low­ing their favored tech­niques. Meanwhile, man­agers are strug­gling to fill the rest of the team with new pro­gram­mers look­ing for IDE sup­port and find­ing only a grab-​bag of Vim extensions.

But there’s hope.

Perl has start­ed incor­po­rat­ing fea­tures expect­ed of mod­ern pro­gram­ming lan­guages into its core while mak­ing room for fur­ther exper­i­men­ta­tion via CPAN. The Language Server Protocol (from Microsoft of all places!) has enabled Perl IDE fea­tures in text edi­tors to boost pro­duc­tiv­i­ty for new and expe­ri­enced devel­op­ers alike. And there’s a pilot Request For Comment process for fur­ther improvements.

These efforts point to a future where Perl’s expres­sive strength is mar­ried with sen­si­ble defaults and fea­tures with­out break­ing back­ward com­pat­i­bil­i­ty. Maybe the curse can be overcome.