On Mon, Mar 02, 2015 at 02:59:40AM -0600, T.J. Duchene wrote:

[cut]

>
> Contrary to what most "modern" programmers would like to promote, I
> do not believe for one second that mandatorily garbage collected,
> bounded languages create better code design. I would subscribe to
> precisely the reverse, actually. If there is a flaw in the
> collector or the bound check, you have an extremely hard to fix
> problem that affects virtually everything. You are also
> continuously wasting resources on overhead for features that can
> fail without warning. Even if you set that aside, the reality is
> that you are investing in all of that wasted overhead for vanishing
> returns. At no time are those features a 100% effective solution to
> the problems they were intended to solve, and they create entirely
> new ones. So what good are they, really?
>
> Any code that does not work reliably isn't worth much.
>

I honestly can't see all this failing around of code written in
Python, Perl or Ruby :) Bad code is bad code in C, C++, Perl, Python,
LISP, or whatever other language you can think of, and bad code will
either get better or die. IMHO the evil is not in any specific
language, but in the way you use it.

Concerning "performance", well it is not always the most important
thing. I personally use C a lot for simulations and scientific
calculations, but I would never do data analysis and postprocessing in
C, since it would require every time a few days just to have a running
thing to be used only once or twice, while I can do the same task in
Python with 10 minutes coding and a few minutes more processing. In
that case, *my* time and *my* performance is more important than the
time it takes to the machine to crunch a few million numbers :)

While I totally agree about the necessity to teach "good programming
practices" to young coders, I am convinced that there is no such thing
as the "perfect" language. It's just a matter of taste. And if you are
a good coder you will write good code in asm, C, Perl, Python or
Erlang. If you are not, then your code will be crap anyway :)

HND

KatolaZ

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[ Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ --- GLUG Catania -- Freaknet Medialab ]
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