On Fri, Dec 05, 2014 at 10:03:42PM -0600, T.J. Duchene wrote:
> Thanks for the comments! Those were some great thoughts.
>
> As I said in my original post, it was geared more toward discussion
> material - and I'm very pleased that Henrik and Vlad decided to speak.
> There really is no right answer to the language question, no perfect tool.
> My opinions of Python still stand. I've never felt comfortable with the way
> that Python has wiggled its way into becoming a Linux dependency,
> especially given its status as a "de-facto" language with no official
> standard that can be backward compatible. It is a fact that dynamically
> typed languages are somewhat unpredictable in comparison to statically
> typed. Python is not a bad language, but it has what an "old school"
> programmer like myself would consider to be several flaws. For example, I
> despise garbage collection with extreme prejudice. Flaws in the garbage
> collector can lead to memory leaks that cannot be corrected until a new
> runtime is issued upstream, offering developers using the language a
> freaking nightmare in the meantime.

Garbage collectors should not have flaws; that I agree on. Which means
that they should be small, clear. modular, and heavily used.
Nontheless, except for really critical real-time applications, a
garbage collector is a godsend for promoting reliability of the software
built upon it.

Modula3, by the way, has both garbage-collected and
non-garbage-collected storage. But it provides no guarantees of system
integrity if you free nongarbage-collected storage. The responsibility
becomes entirely yours.

-- hendrik