Biden administration calls for developers to embrace memory-safe programing languages and move away from those that cause buffer overflows and other memory access vulnerabilities.

Biden administration calls for developers to embrace memory-safe programing languages and move away from those that cause buffer overflows and other memory access vulnerabilities.

  • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
    0·
    9 months ago

    half of all programmers are even worse than average

    That’s not how that works at all. Ever hear of bell curves?

    • Feathercrown@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      Bell curves don’t work to make this point. A bell curve is symmetrical, so half of developers will always be below average on a bell curve. But yes, it is true that for other types of distributions, more or less than half of the developers could be below average. What the person above you was looking for, in the general case, would be the median.

    • Pennomi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      The mean is in the center of the bell curve, so I’m not sure what your point is.

      • thisfro@slrpnk.net
        0·
        9 months ago

        Average is the mean (i.e. sum of all “skill” divided by the amount of programmers)

        What they were thinking of is the median (50th percentile = 0.5 quantile), which splits the group in two equal sized groups.

        For a bell curve, they are the same values. But think of the example of average incomes: 9 people have an income of 10$, one has an income of 910$. The average income is 100$ ((10*9+910)/10). The median is basically 10 however.

        • Bademantel@feddit.de
          0·
          9 months ago

          The distribution of skill in humans, for various tasks and abilities, can often be approximated by a normal distribution. In that case, as you know, the mean is equal to the average.