The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C • Hacker News Board

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#31

Post by AshleysBrain » Thu, Jan 10, 2013, 3:45 PM UTC

I always get bashed for saying I like C++, but I genuinely don't get how C programmers manage without code like this:

    std::map> foo;

One line and you've set up a nontrivial data structure with automatic memory management. No macro horrors (which are a diabolical way of implementing what C++ templates do well).

Since you can code like C in C++, I'm not sure why more people don't use C-with-templates as a programming style.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#32

Post by mschaef » Thu, Jan 10, 2013, 3:45 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #27

seiji wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In traditional circles (read: not rubymongojs land), C is considered a high level language because you aren't writing assembly or maintaining stacks by hand.

Not in this decade... I used to do embedded programming and even we considered C/C++ to be somewhere in the middle, with Java being the "high level" language for our management software and C/C++ being the "low level" language for our embedded devices.

Did you run Java embedded?

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#33

Post by ryeguy » Thu, Jan 10, 2013, 3:45 PM UTC

Thrymr wrote: post #15

cageface wrote: post #2

C is a fantastic high level language. Nonsense. This sudden C fad is totally baffling to me. C is a great language for low-level work and it does have an attractive minimal elegance but is in absolutely no sense of the term a high level language . A language with next to no standard containers or algorithms, manual memory management, raw pointers, a barely functional string type and minimal standard library and concu…

> C... is in absolutely no sense of the term a high level language. Of course it is. You're not worrying about how many registers your CPU has, or when you swap a register out to memory. All that has been abstracted away for you. The fact that you can access memory locations directly gives you some low-level access, but in a very real sense C is a high-level language. There are higher-level languages with more abstra…

The problem is that the "level" of a language is relative to other languages. If C is a high level language, that means you can group it into the same pool as Java, C#, Haskell, Python, and Ruby. Don't you see a bit of a difference here? Unless there is a significant number of actual languages, not concepts, that are below C, it logically has to be called a "low level language" because there really isn't much below it but there are TONS of languages above it.

At the very least, it's something like a medium-level language. Grouping it with much higher-abstracted languages is just wrong.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#34

Post by rurounijones » Thu, Jan 10, 2013, 3:48 PM UTC

Thrymr wrote: post #15

cageface wrote: post #2

C is a fantastic high level language. Nonsense. This sudden C fad is totally baffling to me. C is a great language for low-level work and it does have an attractive minimal elegance but is in absolutely no sense of the term a high level language . A language with next to no standard containers or algorithms, manual memory management, raw pointers, a barely functional string type and minimal standard library and concu…

> C... is in absolutely no sense of the term a high level language. Of course it is. You're not worrying about how many registers your CPU has, or when you swap a register out to memory. All that has been abstracted away for you. The fact that you can access memory locations directly gives you some low-level access, but in a very real sense C is a high-level language. There are higher-level languages with more abstra…

It may have been a high level language when it was a choice between ASM and C but the definition of "high level" has moved on. C is no longer a high level language.

Just like diamonds are no longer at the top of the mohs scale. C is no longer anywhere near the top of "high" in "High level" languages.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#35

Post by mjs » Thu, Jan 10, 2013, 3:48 PM UTC

"bolted-on support for concurrency"--just what are your options when it comes to concurrency and C?

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#36

Post by mschaef » Thu, Jan 10, 2013, 3:49 PM UTC

cageface wrote: post #2

C is a fantastic high level language. Nonsense. This sudden C fad is totally baffling to me. C is a great language for low-level work and it does have an attractive minimal elegance but is in absolutely no sense of the term a high level language . A language with next to no standard containers or algorithms, manual memory management, raw pointers, a barely functional string type and minimal standard library and concu…

> a barely functional string type

There's a string type in C? All I see are character arrays and a few (poorly thought out) conventions for using them.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#37

Post by fusiongyro » Thu, Jan 10, 2013, 3:51 PM UTC

> I've had intense and torrid love affairs with Java, C++, and Erlang.

Oh, but this time it's different, this time it's the real thing?

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#38

Post by gizmo686 » Thu, Jan 10, 2013, 3:53 PM UTC

skrebbel wrote: post #3

To nitpick on a single statement: > C has the fastest development interactivity of any mainstream statically typed language. What? Despite all its shortcomings, Java in a modern IDE effectively has zero build time. The level of interactivity is as fast as that of interpreted languages. I haven't seen anyone manage this with C yet.

I have worked on several projects in Java (using Eclipse as an IDE). In my experience there is a 'significant' latency between when I hit run, and my program starts. (My suspicion is this time is spent starting the JVM, not compiling).

Every (non kernel) C project I have worked with has effectively 0 build time after making changes. This is because they all used make which (like Eclipse and likely all IDEs) only recompiles the files you changed. However, there is not the startup time of the VM (which for every non Java VM I have seen is also effectively 0.)

As an aside, does anyone know why Java has an unusually high startup time?

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#39

Post by mschaef » Thu, Jan 10, 2013, 3:53 PM UTC

I've recently been doing a little bit of C hacking on a small app with a web based interface. I've missed the higher level collections and I/O facilities, but some parts of the experience have been really refreshing. There are mature tools, the softwawre builds in no time at all, and it's been easy to make it fast to both run and startup.

Dropping down to C has taken an attitude adjustement, and a willingness to drop certain kinds of features, but it's really been quite refreshing.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#40

Post by jfb » Thu, Jan 10, 2013, 3:53 PM UTC

Thrymr wrote: post #15

cageface wrote: post #2

C is a fantastic high level language. Nonsense. This sudden C fad is totally baffling to me. C is a great language for low-level work and it does have an attractive minimal elegance but is in absolutely no sense of the term a high level language . A language with next to no standard containers or algorithms, manual memory management, raw pointers, a barely functional string type and minimal standard library and concu…

> C... is in absolutely no sense of the term a high level language. Of course it is. You're not worrying about how many registers your CPU has, or when you swap a register out to memory. All that has been abstracted away for you. The fact that you can access memory locations directly gives you some low-level access, but in a very real sense C is a high-level language. There are higher-level languages with more abstra…

C wasn't high level when it was born, still less now.