On 03/03/2015 07:19 PM, Nuno Magalhães wrote:
> So what you're saying is that all languages are syntactic sugar over
> assembly? :)

Not at all. C was designed specifically to allow code to be portable,
instead of assembly which is not.

I said "usually". What I mean is that many arguments in favour of
specific high level languages are mostly syntactic sugar arguments.
Those languages are usually implemented in C, and the advantages that
they supposedly offer can be achieved using C.

> More and more i see "it'll be more work / take longer to implement /
> be more complex" as developer excuses to use more "user-friendly"
> languages like java (and less and less developers learning C in
> college so they're biased).
>
Yes. I can't speak for others, but I can implement far more cleanly
designed and reliable solutions using C than other choices. I can
certainly write "less code" using Python or Perl, but I can do exactly
the same thing with C by using a library.

IMHO less code is not better over the long term. Having a clean design
from the beginning trumps "fast and dirty" that most people use every
time. I can't tell you how much time I have spent in the last two
decades cleaning up other people's disasters.


t.j.