From Cringely
Now Dash-O no
This turns out to be entirely serious, though I still don’t know whether to laugh as loudly as I have been doing. What it’s about is the need for large companies to be sure that their code can be hidden, even when it’s published — in this case to a Java machine.
Note that Perl has this mechanism built in. This makes me all the more admiring of the people who built Movable Type, on which I am writing this, inPerl. It’s the most elegant piece of web software I have ever used.
It works, too, which makes a nice change after a long morning trying to book a quick trip to San Francisco, and finding that the only flights for less than
Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. Obfustication is an ancient and honourable art, but in the end you have to deliver code that computers can use. So your computer has to be able to tell variable ‘a’ from variable ‘also called a’. And if your computer can do it, it can tell you about it. You can’t look at a listing and do it by eye, but chances are you have a computer nearby and you know how to program it.
In any case, decompilation is now illegal so you shouldn’t be looking. And as David Kirk (chief scientist at Nvidia) said when I was talking to him about their Cg compiler — which might just be the MS-DOS of graphics — “IP is much overrated. You can only do something new once, and then everyone knows about it.” He would say that, as Cg forces you to ship your source code with your product, but he has a point. And I’m not sure why Microsoft is so scared of letting people see its source code — it’s not as if the company doesn’t have the resources to prosecute anyone who rips them off, and how many marvels of algorithmic genius hide in Windows anyway?
Actually, I am sure why Windows source code is kept so hidden.
And yes, Perl is auto-obfusc. So’s C, if you abuse it enough.
Am I the only person here?
R
No.