The choice of "security as an afterthought" and "never had any security holes ever" is a false choice between two extremes that don't actually exist (well, at least the second). The poster is referring to two very different approaches to software security. OpenBSD's approach is considered to be the most uncompromising in the industry, and goes further than probably most of us would prefer to go, but nonetheless serves as a good example of what's possible. You can read about it here: http://www.openbsd.org/security.html and there's also some good papers/presentations here: http://www.openbsd.org/papers/ .

I love openbsd but even their proactive approach hasn't made them immune to remote exploits

It's not about total and complete prevention, it's about reduction of risk. Your logic taken to its logical conclusion would argue against practically any risk mitigation measures at all. For instance, even SSL/TLS have not been immune to exploits.

Logical fallacy: "Fallacy of gray".

http://lesswrong.com/lw/mm/the_fallacy_of_gray/

I've used a lot of different languages, libraries, frameworks, and whatnot over my career. They all have their own problems.

Some, however, have far, far more problems (and more serious problems) than others. JavaScript, Ruby and PHP are three examples of very troubled languages. The languages themselves are filled with rather stupid flaws. Their communities are toxic, and in many cases ignorant. The software written in such languages generally exhibits poor performance, poor security, poor maintainability, and various other issues.

Call it "FUD" if you want. I see it more as the expression of truths that some find painful to acknowledge. Some programming languages and their surrounding environments are much, much worse than others. I'm not going to pretend that they're good when they aren't.

Well since your affirmations are never argumented nor sourced, I have hard time qualifying then as "expression of truth". They are much like "immovable opinion of a troll" to me.

Again in this comment you blame Ruby/PHP/Javascript without any detail:

> poor performance, poor security, poor maintainability, and various other issues.

Hum, well ok ... compared to what ? All these properties seems relative to me. And I really don't think that a langage / platform can combine all of them. Just like a database can't be CAP or like the project triangle[0]. Engineering is all about tradeoffs.

> Their communities are toxic, and in many cases ignorant.

Hum, even better... Even from Theo de Raadt this sentence would feel arrogant to me.

Just to be clear I have no problem with you having this opinion, and I don't really want to debate about it. I just wanted to know if you had some rational behind it. Now I have my idea...

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_triangle

Logical fallacy: "Fallacy of gray".

This one many intelligent people fall for and I can't for the heck of myself understand why, so now every single time I read it I'll post this:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/mm/the_fallacy_of_gray/

I hope I'll get upvoted relentlessly until people stop making that fallacy.

I think he was actually pointing out a difference in approaches. OpenBSD tend to take the conservative line, the Ruby crowd seem to take the front-door open with Yaml parsers blazing ready to run arbitrary code line.

I am sure it is possible to write conservative, stable, secure frameworks and tools in Ruby, but it is rather telling that we don't.