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Comment by vec | Hacker News Reader

> Imagine you make a tool and someone proposes making a change to that tool that would be potentially useful to slavers, people who enslave other people. This makes you hesitate.

No, it really doesn't. "Bad people might use it to do something I don't approve of" is a terrible rationale for not creating something, mostly because it's almost always true. Strong crypto is great for terrorists. Psychology research is wonderful for propagandists in dictatorships. Unlocked cell phones are very useful for drug trafficking rings.

If we, as a species, refused to innovate when we weren't sure of the consequences, we would still be arguing about whether fire was a good idea.

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This may sound like a reductio at absurdum, but if that innovation threaten your ability to survive, you will be very reluctant to research it, won't you? Gcc has been the very foundation of gnu, it's the cornerstone of the whole ecosystem: you cannot run Linux (or hurd) without compiling it first. Imagine you'd be commissioned to the fabrication of a virus immune to all known forms of treatments for the purpose of using it to hotpatch cancerous cells. Obviously this tech could have much more dangerous applications, and without a way to disable it, noone would stand a chance. In that scenario, wouldn't you try to reduce this virus' immunity to the minimum needed for its planned usage?

Being used for bad purposes is different than having a net negative effect. E.g. if you are making weapons or something like that.

A lot of people do this. Some people do refuse to work on military technologies. Even Google declared it wouldn't produce anything for the military with the robotics startups it's acquired. Some of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan project later regretted it.

If you really do believe the thing you are working on will have a net negative effect on the world than maybe you shouldn't work on it.

Military weapons have few non-violent uses. ASTs have many uses other than assisting proprietary IDEs (for example, allowing emacs to complete with proprietary IDEs on a level playing field).

It's more akin to refusing to manufacture kitchen knives and forcing all the chefs in your kitchen to chop things with spoons. Even though anybody who wants to stab people already has easy access to very big and sharp knives just by stepping into any other kitchen in the world. Also lots of your chefs keep sneaking over to the kitchen over the road to chop things and no newly trained chef wants to work in your kitchen because they think only chopping with spoons is stupid and only done by crazy religious old men with big beards. OK this metaphor is getting pretty stretched now.

The original OP was not adressing things that can have a dialetic good/bad use like a knife, but things that can only have a bad effect, like guns for instance, they will only be used to hurt or take lives, you cant cook with a gun..

In his manhattan project example, produce atomic bombs will have only one bad consequence, same with guns, but not the same as a knife.

I don't think the issue is just allowing proprietary IDEs to interface with Gcc; I think there are deeper issues at play.

Also, I wouldn't say that he's forcing anyone to chop things, he's more likely saying "let's make dishes from recipes which don't require chopping things", but his cooks are still used to chopping. Is there really an alternative to strong "intellisense" and refactoring abilities in IDEs for efficient development ? I don't know. I personally feels that this is a necessary step. Maybe RMS, with his experience of AI research (iirc), has a different view.

> Maybe RMS, with his experience of AI research (iirc), > has a different view.

RMS primarily uses C and Lisp. Lisp source code is a tree already. And C is so simple you can get by with tags and such.

If he was a C++/Java/C# programmer (which he is not) he may have a different feeling on the importance of the AST relative to the risk of Microsoft using gcc with VisualStuio to offer advanced features while by-passing the GPL.

Of course, but even with lisp you can't (programmatically) work on the code without having that code representation. If it's trivial, then there's no harm in opening it, but RMS thinks otherwise, so there must be something else.

A better analogy would be organic vs. non-organic food, where the non-organic food can get you much more consistent and cheaper results, but leads to a lot of negative externalities whose effects compound over time.

One is focused on short-term quarterly profit, the other on long-term social goods.

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