Tim May writes:
Take it or leave it, as an analysis, but the "try writing some code" is a meaningless insult. [more good comments elided]
Agreed. I concur with Tim's further comments, which I've omitted, on the meaning of "Cypherpunks write code". It's clear that the qualifications for being a critic (in the constructive sense) of activity XYZ differ from the requirements for doing XYZ, in the general case. This is the old "Oh, if you're so smart, let's see you do it better" from elementary school. Absurd. One of the primary sources of this dispute is, I think, the fact that c'punks have widely divergent target markets in mind. I was rather surprised to observe this at the last Bay Area physical meeting. Sandy moderated a prognostication session on the future of cryptoanarchy, etc. Towards the end, he asked each person to offer his/her definition of "victory" in the cryptoanarchic program. Some people were adamant that privacy would need to be widely protected across society for them to consider the project a success. Others essentially asserted that they'd be content with what I'll call "the cypherpunk community" enjoying free access to privacy-preserving tools. The various *n*x crypto tools go a long way toward satisfying one market, yet don't appear to help much with another market. So they constitute a "big win" for some c'punks, while remaining largely irrelevant for others. It would behoove c'punks on all sides not to take umbrage at others' embracing different goals. It would be great to hear persuasive arguments as to why "we" should adopt your plan, but "we" are under no obligation to be convinced, or to place any particular value on the achievement of aims we don't share with you. The significant segregation of software developers and software users onto different platforms makes the disunity of purpose much more of an issue than it would be otherwise. A conscious effort must be exerted to ensure that tools developed for the cognoscenti ;) have a chance to run on the machines owned by the rest of the multiverse. For my money, this is the best feature of platform-independent languages, etc. Ideally, Java and such will afford me the opportunity to write code for, say, the Macintosh, which could compete with native code, without my having to break down and use a Mac (gag). On a related note, this summer I've broken down and found myself developing software in Tcl under VMS. (I'm typing this on a VAXstation 4000 VLC.) Bob Snyder has recommended exmh here before, a highly MIME- and PGP-aware mailer for *n*x which is apparently built with Tcl/Tk. Apart from the discussions of possibly using Safe-Tcl for remailers, I haven't seen much talk of using Tcl/Tk for crypto apps here. Can anyone point me in the direction of work on this front, or towards reasons why Tcl/Tk seems like a poor choice ? I'm still pretty new to Tcl. -L. Futplex McCarthy <lmccarth@cs.umass.edu> "Want to put your secret files where no-one will ever be able to access them ? Try ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/"