On Tuesday 28 May 2024 at 23:16:42, Steve Litt wrote:

> I've looked into the newer languages like rust and go and Julia, and
> they don't work for me.
>
> As far as Julia, it's buggy as hell.

Hm, references?

> With go and rust, these languages seem much broader than C, Python,
> Lua, old school Turbo Pascal and the like.
>
> What I mean by "broader" is that you need to memorize a whole lot of
> stuff because a whole lot of stuff is built into the language instead
> of just being createable in the language.

Isn't that supposed to be one of the advantages of them - that you don't have
to build stuff for yourself, but it's built in, and is (presumably) done well?

After all, look at a modern API to interact with some database-backed system:
sure, you could go in and talk to the database itself, but it's generally much
cleaner to learn the API and use the appropriate methods to get at the data
you want. You still need to learn the API, though.

> As a counterexample, take C. C has very few commands and keywords to
> remember. Learn =, ==, <, >, if, while, for, struct, typedef, arrays
> and pointers and a small portion of the standard library and you're
> good to go. When you need to do something, you don't search for a
> command to do it, you just make it. If you didn't know about memcpy(),
> you could write it in about 6 lines of C.

I've never quite decided whether C (which I have many years of experience
coding in) is a low-level language (because you can make it do anything you
like and it won't protect you from being a bad programmer) or a high-level
language (because you're not actually dealing with the assembler and machine
code unless you really really force things, and it has nice constructs such as
block coding and if/else which you don't get with assembler code).


Antony

--
Perfection in design is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but
rather when there is nothing left to take away.

- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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