On Wed, Mar 04, 2015 at 02:02:28AM -0600, T.J. Duchene wrote:

[cut]

>
> 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.

I must disagree on this point: the validity of your statement depends
quite heavily on the "measure" you use to quantify if something is an
advantage or not. You are convinced that such "measures" are
"objective", and that they basically boil down to code efficiency
(with respect to what? CPU time? Memory usage? disk access? what
else?).

I am convinced instead that what you call "syntactic sugar" is not
just that. More often that not it is a matter of "semantics", i.e. of
having the possibility of expressing *concepts* (yes, programs are, to
a certain extent, *concepts*) in a different way, which might result
in an easier development, easier maintenance, easier debugging, easier
re-engineering, or simply *more beautiful code* according to the
coder's perspective.

After all coding is an intimately *selfish* activity, and serves
*selfish* needs, which are *subjective* and *non-universal* at
all. That's why people have *fun* coding. That's the same reason why
things like the IOCCC (http://www.ioccc.org/) or the shell fork bomb
actually exist.

Otherwise it would just be a repetitive mechanical activity, not that
much different from the typical screwing or bolting of the good
old-fashined production chains :)

>
> >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.
>

I am sure you can. And I reassure you that I could as well. Only,
sometimes my time is much more worth than the few seconds of CPU I
could spare. And sometimes I am just not in the right mood to code in
C or in Python or in Perl... :)

> 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.
>

I bet you have been cleaning up disasters not because people program
in Haskell instead of C, but again because those people were bad
programmers, not good ones ;)

HND

KatolaZ

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