Holy moly. I was explaining (my interpretation of) Kevin's assertion that he'd go for C. I even started with "I'm not saying I agree". I don't really have a strong opinion, but I'm not going to pre-judge a group who has developed in C for the reasons I gave. C++, sure, I'll pre-judge you if you're using that. :)
On Wed, Jun 11, 2014 at 12:28 PM, clay <[email protected]> wrote: > Your reasons for preferring C are stability and long term longevity? > > Are those factors really that important? If a language only lasts 40 years > rather than 100 or 1000 years, do you actually care? Like in a roaches will > outlast human kind sort of way? Is stability the big thing holding you back > from Java or C#? For all the legitimate gripes about Java/C#, basic > stability and compiler crashes generally are not among them. > > Secondly, that isn't consistent with your preference of Scala on the JVM > and Idris off the JVM. I find it hard to believe that Scala+Idris have > better stability than Java and will be around longer than Java. I prefer > Scala over Java for the advanced elegance, conciseness, and expression, but > IMO, Scala has been a buggier language than Java, it's less serious about > backward compatibility, and it probably won't last as many decades into the > future as a legacy technology as Java will. > > Other tools might not have "the VM cost", but they all have some > performance profile that can be quantified and logically compared. Java > often does fairly well in those tests. > > > On Wednesday, June 11, 2014 11:41:38 AM UTC-5, Ricky Clarkson wrote: > >> I'm not saying I agree, but there are reasons. C works. You aren't >> going to get a compiler segfault, then discover a debugger bug while trying >> to debug the compiler, then fix that only to find that your build tool >> doesn't work when your path contains spaces, and then find that you can't >> read MP3 files without an extra library that hasn't been maintained since >> the big bang, etc. If you need to write your own C compiler for any >> reason, nobody is going to sue you. >> >> C will still exist when Objective-C, PHP, ASP, VB, Perl, Python, Ruby and >> probably C# and Java, have all bitten the dust, because it *actually* works >> everywhere and is kind of a base on which pretty much everything else can >> be built without incurring 'the VM cost', however imaginary or real that >> cost may be. >> >> It's also almost one of *the* bases, barring the 100s of special cases it >> is a really simple language, kind of fundamental the same way Scheme, >> Smalltalk and Forth are (i.e., hard to reduce further without losing real >> capability). >> >> >> On Wed, Jun 11, 2014 at 7:45 AM, clay <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> >>> On Friday, June 6, 2014 12:31:34 PM UTC-5, KWright wrote: >>>> >>>> Nope! >>>> >>>> C or Idris, I'll also accept Assembler. >>>> >>>> and Scala's the least bad you can get if otherwise tied to the JVM. :) >>>> >>> >>> I completely understand why you prefer Idris/Haskell over Scala and >>> Scala over Java. >>> >>> But why on Earth would you also prefer C? That seems to go the opposite >>> direction and be a big step down from Java? >>> >>> All the things Scala fixes from Java are broken in C as well: if >>> expressions, for/monad comprehensions, focus on immutability, pervasive >>> type inference, cleaned up generics, array syntax that is unified with >>> generics (Array[Type] rather than Type[]), language level currying and >>> partial functions, overridable var/val and ideal property system, singleton >>> objects instead of static. >>> >>> And C/C++ is worse than Java: #define/#include, header files, >>> __declspec, library dependency system is a wreck, ABI issues across >>> binaries, hairy legacy issues that are far worse than Java, wildly varying >>> implementations of the "standard", super complex networking/threading/file >>> apis that make the Java standard library a work of art. Did you ever use >>> COM/ActiveX? Have you ever worked with international strings in C? It's a >>> major pain, it's wildly non-standard between different compiler vendors, >>> and makes every other language ridiculously elegant in comparison. >>> >>> Programmers often hate the tool they use for work, because they have to >>> deal with lots of legacy code and annoying coworkers with conflicting >>> styles. When they use another language/tool on the side, they can do >>> everything exactly how they want, so the other tool seems better. If you >>> had to deal with large amounts of typical legacy business C code, I expect >>> you would appreciate Java a lot more. And if you used Idris for work with >>> tons of legacy code and annoying coworkers, it would be better because >>> Idris/Haskell are so strict about enforcing certain conventions, but it >>> still wouldn't be ideal. >>> >>> >>> >>> -- >>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google >>> Groups "Java Posse" group. >>> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send >>> an email to [email protected]. >>> To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. >>> >>> Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse. >>> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. >>> >> >> -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Java Posse" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Java Posse" group. 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