From: Christopher Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The six stages of programmer development:
1) Wow, I can do cool stuff with this language!
2) This language has serious flaws. I can't believe the language
designers were so stupid.
3) Wow, this other language addresses all the short comings of the prior
language I was using. The new language is the answer to all my dreams.
It's perfect.
4) Repeat 2 & 3 until enlightenment.
5) Ah, now I get it. Language design is about trade-offs. All languages
have shortcomings.
6) You know, there is a certain combination of design trade-offs that
really suit me. Maybe if I put them together in to a language I can
sucker some programmers in stages 1-3 in to using it.
I'm in stage 6, but someone already wrote the language for me. It's C,
compiled with max warning level and warnings as errors. To me its really
the perfect language:
1)Its simple. WYWIWYG (What you write is what you get). No hidden calls,
assumed functions, type interpretation, etc.
2)You don't have to worry about exception safety because there are no
exceptions. THis is a good thing- exceptions are an ugly hack around
correctly error checking and correctly designing your program
3)Its not burdened by 5 billion features that require a thousand+ page spec
to describe.
4)You can find books and books on wierd Java and C++ issues (for example-
Java Puzzlers and Exceptional C++). THere are no wierd C issues.
5)I don't need to worry about wether something is being passed by reference
or value (I'm looking at you, C++ with reference parameters).
I could go on, but I won't bother. C does everything I want, and most
importantly nothing I don't want. My complaints with the language are
minimal (I'd like function overloading), but fixing them would break some of
its good points. I don't even bother to look at other languages anymore,
they're all going the wrong way- humongous standard libraries and tons of
features that serve only to become obscure bugs. Perfection was reached in
the 70s, everything since has been second system-itis.
Gabe
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