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**Matan Peled:** I guess... It just prints -- like, it tells you when you entered the function and when you left the function, and that's a trace, right? |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, that is a little signal, isn't it? |
**Matan Peled:** Yeah. |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, that's a good point. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** And it can be fun to add a timestamp to those. Then it's like a proper log. |
**Mat Ryer:** There you go. If you use the log function... If you log println or something in Go, you get the timestamp for free. You could use Go in your work, because one of the nice things about Go is it's an open source language. You have at your disposal available all the packages that the Go toolchain itself uses... |
Go actually now is written in Go. Talk about meta programming... Go used to be written in C, and now it's written in Go. I can't wait for that initial information to be lost in generations' time, and they just know that Go is written in Go, and no one knows how... I love the idea of that. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Yeah, we'll use rr to go back... |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah. \[laughs\] |
**Matan Peled:** No, wait... Once you said that, I have to tell you about what I think is one of the coolest things ever... And that is a talk called "Reflections on trusting trust", I think by Brian Kernighan... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Also available in the show notes... |
**Matan Peled:** Ken Thompson, sorry. It's Ken Thompson. So it's a thing that compilers for languages should be written, or -- compiler writers like to write them in the language that they are compiling. So this is called a self-hosting language, and it's basically a milestone for a programming language to have a self-... |
And the idea behind "Reflections on trusting trust" is that the C compiler is written in C, and it compiles itself. So if you added a backdoor into it, for example every time that it tries to compile the logging program, then it also adds a little backdoor that accepts a username and password that is unknown, then that... |
So what we could do is add another backdoor into the compiler where it adds a backdoor into itself when it compiles itself, that both adds this backdoor and adds a backdoor for the logging program. And then you would have a backdoor that is basically undetectable, unless someone is especially fond of reading compiled a... |
**Mat Ryer:** Oh, wow... That is awesome. That's really creepy. |
**Matan Peled:** It is. |
**Mat Ryer:** It's like a Black Mirror episode, really, or something like that. |
**Matan Peled:** Yeah. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** There must be some virus, some hacking software that is using this... And it seems to have been around for a while. |
**Matan Peled:** Yeah. |
**Mat Ryer:** He wrote that in 1984... |
**Matan Peled:** \[47:47\] So it's been around so long that there have been anti-reflections of trusting trust ideas, where you basically have to use multiple compilers to get one verified output, and there's a whole slew of ideas that combat this... But if you like these ideas of things that reference themselves and t... |
**Mat Ryer:** Mat does. |
**Matan Peled:** ...then there's a book called "Gödel, Escher, Bach", which I can't recommend enough. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** Joining the recommendation, for sure. |
**Mat Ryer:** Yes. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** That is a very interesting one. |
**Mat Ryer:** I love that book. I agree. It's bonkers. It's so good. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** If the three of us agree... |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah, there you go. This doesn't sound -- go on, Natalie. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** \[laughs\] |
**Mat Ryer:** If all three of us agree... |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** It does not sound like an unpopular opinion. |
**Mat Ryer:** Yeah! |
**Jingle:** \[48:36\] to \[48:55\] |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** You have to agree this one was smooth. |
**Mat Ryer:** Brilliant. That's the best one yet. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** This also is another popular opinion. Okay, Matan - so as a preparation for this episode we asked you to come up with an unpopular opinion that can or does not have to be related to Go, or programming, or anything like that. So we're ready to hear... What is your unpopular opinion? |
**Matan Peled:** So my unpopular opinion is that after going through all that, hyping up static analysis and all the things that it can do, my unpopular opinion is that it actually doesn't work. It works up to a point, it does all the cute things, it does the simple things, but you can only make it so complicated befor... |
**Mat Ryer:** Is this just your kind of academic brain seeking out perfection, and not finding it? |
**Matan Peled:** That, and my grad student brain trying to do things repeatedly, and failing, and saying that "Well, maybe this doesn't work." Yeah, so my unpopular opinion is that software engineers basically have job security, and computers won't replace them. |
**Mat Ryer:** Oh, there you go... But I think that's gonna be very popular. We will test this on Twitter. |
**Matan Peled:** But not in my academic niche. |
**Mat Ryer:** No, it's not good for you at all. At all. \[laughs\] Are you gonna quit and do something different, or sticking with it? |
**Matan Peled:** No, I think I want to push it as far as it will go, but keep in mind that maybe it won't be infinitely far. |
**Mat Ryer:** Oh, that's amazing. |
**Natalie Pistunovich:** I think we'll all slowly get to be more prompt engineers, which is sort of maybe the next level of abstraction, but not necessarily... But we'll basically be guiding the AI to do things for us, among them programming... And it's technically natural language, but it's not exactly the English we'... |
**Mat Ryer:** We could just write the tests. I feel like even with the fuzzing thing it could make this work. |
**Matan Peled:** Oh, so you say that, but that is a thing. I have friends who are researching that. It's called synthesis, and it's basically - you write the specification of a program, and the tests are specifying what the program should do, and synthesis... Like, either, again, you do machine learning, or you just se... |
\[51:58\] Excel, if you think about it and all the autofill things that you can do, is basically this. You write what you want it to output, and then you drag it, and then it figures everything out. Especially with the new features they've added. |
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