I believe writing C or C++ code is harder than writing interpreted code. My aim has always been to produce the best product I could, not to produce it with as little effort as possible. I hope the extra effort was worth it. I guess time will tell if I chose correctly.
One caveat of languages like C and C++ is that you are opening yourself to several classes of potential security problems that interpreted languages tend not to have. You have to deal with things like buffer overflow attacks, one of the more common kind, that can come from you not crossing every "t" and dotting every "i" with your memory management. Interpreted languages take care of these sorts of things for you, so they are orders of magnitude more secure by default. You have to put in a lot of effort with C and C++ to be just as secure. (Sure, the interpreter engines themselves could have such problems, but they are exceedingly rare due to their common code being heavily used and examined by a relatively large group.) The main advantages of C is that you can get the smallest possible footprint and greatest possible speed; it is best applied to what would be bottlenecks. -- Darren Duncan
