Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's why we have valgrind and glib. At the core, a good language shouldn't really have any of these things you say built in - they should be built on top of the language itself.
Having strings, containers, etc, not built into the language itself means that you can't practically use them. Libraries will all have their own incarnations, and as a result you get stuck dealing with the lowest common denominator of C arrays.
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C
41–50 of 394 posts
Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C
#42To 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'd rather have a Repl than a "modern IDE".
C does not have or need a Repl because it's not designed for giant single programs anyway. Unix is the C Repl.
Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C
#43Earlier 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.
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Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C
#44C 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
#45[deleted]
Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C
#46C/C++/Java. A programmer's version of Rock/Paper/Scissors.
Ignoring pre-history (BASIC, FORTRAN, PDP-11 assembler, Z80 assembler, Pascal), I started out in C, many years ago. I found myself using macros and libraries to provide useful combinations of state and functions. I was reinventing objects and found C++.
I was a very happy user of C++ for many years, starting very early on (cfront days). But I was burned by the complexity of the language, and the extremely subtle interaction of features. And I was tired of memory management. I was longing for Java, and then it appeared.
And I was happy. As I was learning the language, I was sure I missed something. Every object is in the heap? Really? There is really no way to have one object physically embedded within another? But everything else was so nice, I didn't care.
And now I'm writing a couple of system that would like to use many gigabytes of memory, containing millions of objects, some small, some large. The per-object overhead is killing me. GC tuning is a nightmare. I'm implementing suballocation schemes. I'm writing microbenchmarks to compare working with ordinary objects with objects serialized to byte arrays. And since C++ has become a hideous mess, far more complicated than the early version that burned me, I long for C again.
So I don't like any language right now.
Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C
#47C 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.
It may be cumbersome, but C has string handling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_string_handling
Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
You can do some very interesting things with function pointers, structs, unions and judicious use of void pointers. I would absolutely group it with Java. Not saying they are very very similar, but you can do similar things.
Now grouping Java with Haskell, that doesn't seem like a reasonable grouping.
Of course, it's all swings and roundabouts really. You can draw lines anywhere.
Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C
#49C 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 a mid-level language and it dominates that space.
The high-level space still doesn't have a winner and it probably won't for some time. It has a lot of excellent languages that are all radically different (Clojure, Haskell, Python, Scala, Erlang) and each is really cool in some ways and very infuriating in others. C, of course, is really cool in some ways and very infuriating in others as well.
I've taken up learning C, and my feeling about it is that it's not a "jump in and figure it out" language, in the way that most technologies are, because you're absolutely right. Naive or "cargo cult" C is going to be a disaster from a security, code-quality, and production stability perspective.
For most technologies to qualify as safe, sane, and consensual, they have to be secure even when wielded by a programmer who cobbled together incomplete knowledge from a few dozen Internet articles about how to do stuff. Not C. There are "quick adoption" technologies with quick learning curves and "lifer" technologies that are quirky and hard to learn at first but provide long-lived knowledge. C is a lifer language. If you don't treat it as such, you'll faceplant.
Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having strings, containers, etc, not built into the language itself means that you can't practically use them. Libraries will all have their own incarnations, and as a result you get stuck dealing with the lowest common denominator of C arrays.
http://developer.gnome.org/glib/ http://apr.apache.org/ Choose one.
That's kind of the point. Why do you have to choose? Why isn't it possible with the language and its standard libraries? What happens when you mix APR code with glib-using code?