Re: [Dng] John Goerzen asks, "Has modern Linux lost its way?"

[Didier Kryn]

Hey Guys, I would love to have a dispute about languages, but I don't think it's in the scope of this mailing list. Do you? Excuse me for having fed it.     Didier Le 12/02/2015 21:07, Jude Nelson a écrit : I tend to use C, C with C++ STL containers (I hesitate to call it "C++"), and Python pretty regularly.  I'd use Python more often if (1) its multi-threading wasn't so terrible (GIL, anyone?), (2) the VM did basic static analysis, like verifying that I didn't use variable before initializing it, and (3) Python 3 was actually backwards-compatible with Python 2. I'm looking forward to seeing how Rust shapes up, once Mozilla can get the language stable enough for me to use it for serious things.  I like the idea of using the compiler to eliminate large classes of error-prone C-isms, like leaking memory or accessing memory outside of a buffer. -Jude On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 2:51 PM, william moss <bill.m.m...@gmail.com> wrote: -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 On 02/12/2015 01:42 PM, Hendrik Boom wrote: > On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 11:25:46AM +0100, Didier Kryn wrote: > ... >> >> I have been programming in C >> from the beginning of the 80's and loved it, but I think C++ is >> wrong by design (personal thought), although I have no choice but to >> use programs written in that language, as well as Perl, Python and >> Ruby, which I have no opinion about. > > I share your opinion about C++.  I too used to use C, since the > mid-seventies.  Except for its abysmal identification of array > subscripting with pointer arithmetic, it's a very clean assembler > replacement. > > C++'s marketing success was to be compatible with C.  It no longer is, > though.  And C++'s complelxity is too much for me. > > I occasionally use C++'s objects.  But for the most part, I try to > write my C code so it indifferently compiles under C++ or C.  Yes, > if means some #if's.  But C++ statically catches some errors that C > doesn't. > > I strongly suspect that most of the code nowadays written in C++ could > better have been written in Modula 3.  The kind of guaranteed instant > response you can in principle get without garbage-collection pauses are > not needed for almost all software. > > But I'd appreciate a more compact syntax for Modula 3, while retaining > its semantics. > > -- hendrik > _______________________________________________ > Dng mailing list > Dng@lists.dyne.org > https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng > C++, originally C with Classes, was a great idea. It added Smalltalk like abstractions to data and bound data to methods. This is long in the past and I no longer use C++. C, in its ANSI/POSIX/ISO incarnation is quite good. Modern C has removed some of its FORTRAN roots and fixed many of the K&R foibles. Pointer arithmetic is what C is all about. The original manual and the Programmer's Workbench both call it a portable assembler. There are no arrays in C, there is a memory region that is addressed by a reference. Pascal and its derivatives (Modula, Ada) do implement real arrays as does PL/I. For scripts, I use byte code languages (Perl mostly these days) with some low level modules written in ANSI C. I do however, miss using FORTH, CLOS and Smalltalk for real applications. Most applications that are not critical to latency or 6 sigma predictability are best served with a byte code language. This places the burden of reliability on the developers of the run time (byte code machine). That said, I have probably written as much code in various assembly languages as in C. I have been using Unix and its analogs for 37 years, computers for engineering for 51 years. My first programs were written in FORTRAN-4, using a model 19 key punch. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.19 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/ iF4EAREIAAYFAlTdBEIACgkQpY/BHpBmP2pW0gD+KnNTAxAVM5ax6tml+l8p9jIq 9XyPuEETBkkl8alkD44A/RhmwKHpglut8OVuC36L718nz1fjudeqYhLP+yAZlodd =c0td -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng

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