It ain’t what you think it’s the language that you think in
A few weeks ago I was talking to Michal, who is a Lead Security Engineer over at Resonance Security. We were planning to discuss cross-chain issues, but as is always the case, the conversation meandered off into different fields, mostly concerning how the programming language you use shapes your view of the world.Simply put, it proposes that the grammar and vocabulary of the language we think in, and the society that we live in and which spawned that language, profoundly influence the way we interpret the world around us. Together, both frame and limit what we are able to mentally conjecture about.Wittgenstein, arguably the foremost philosopher of the 20th century (that is to say, his friends and colleagues argued that he was the foremost philosopher of the 20th century), put in a few simple albeit somewhat inscrutable words:Nobody truly understands Wittgenstein though, possibly because he thought in an Austrian version of the German language, and then translated his thoughts into English.The thing that springs to the mind of any inquisitive software developer reading about these kinds of things is to wonder, “Does the programming language I choose to program in significantly affect the way I think about the tasks at hand? Am I restricting myself by only writing in C++?”If you are a test engineer or an auditor, and you are reviewing smart contracts, the problem of programming language dissonance can be especially acute. You may be using one language, say, JavaScript, to write tests for smart contracts written in another language, for example, Solidity. This involves exhausting context switching as you shift your focus from one programming language to another, and tired test engineers are always tempted to cut corners. Worse still, it can restrict your thought patterns and cause you to miss some significant areas of testing.
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