Antony Stone said on Tue, 28 May 2024 23:54:46 +0200

>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?

Yes. And most people are better at broad than at deep. But I'm not one
of them. And there are many like me, especially in the development
world. Plus, lacking the skills to go deep, the developer is helpless
when there's no tool to do it for them.

>
>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.

Maybe. I'm not sure I'm a fan of SQL.

>
>> 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).

:-) It's a matter of perspective. From the viewpoint of an assembly
programmer or a guy who punches in op codes, C is high level. From the
perspective of a Python programmer, it's low level.

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

LOL, don't tell the preceding sentence to the average modern person who
thinks he's smart. You should see the vitriol I attract on Linux lists
(and even a BSD list) for criticizing systemd.

SteveT

Steve Litt

Autumn 2023 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21