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The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

damienkatz.net

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Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#71

Post by niggler »

madhadron wrote: post #53

Oh for heavens' sakes. Yet more ignorance. A more realistic view of C: - C is straightforward to compile into fast machine code...on a PDP-11. Its virtual machine does not match modern architectures very well, and its explicitness about details of its machine mean FORTRAN compilers typically produce faster code. The C virtual machine does not provide an accurate model of why your code is fast on a modern machine. The…

modern FORTRAN is absolutely horrific, to the extent that F77 is far more popular than more recent flavors (like F90 or F95). It suffers from the same types of problems that the author identifies in C++ and Java.

As for standard library, I learned from K&R and have never been surprised by the library (insofar as I can reasonably predict what will happen, given the guidelines). I cannot say that about the C++ standard library (don't get me started on STL) or Java

And as for debugging, it took me years to become adept at parsing STL error messages (wading through cruft like basic_string to get to the essence of the error).

however I do agree that Borland and turbo pascal are exemplary.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#72

Post by MichaelGG »

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…

That's being deliberately obtuse. How many languages are lower level than C, besides assembly? If your ranking has every language in the "high level" camp, then your ranking is poorly calibrated.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#73

Post by rootbear »

madhadron wrote: post #53

Oh for heavens' sakes. Yet more ignorance. A more realistic view of C: - C is straightforward to compile into fast machine code...on a PDP-11. Its virtual machine does not match modern architectures very well, and its explicitness about details of its machine mean FORTRAN compilers typically produce faster code. The C virtual machine does not provide an accurate model of why your code is fast on a modern machine. The…

Can you elaborate on your first point a bit? How, specifically, does C's machine model not fit current architectures well, aside from multiple cores. How is Fortran's model better?

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#74

Post by DigitalJack »

madhadron wrote: post #53

Oh for heavens' sakes. Yet more ignorance. A more realistic view of C: - C is straightforward to compile into fast machine code...on a PDP-11. Its virtual machine does not match modern architectures very well, and its explicitness about details of its machine mean FORTRAN compilers typically produce faster code. The C virtual machine does not provide an accurate model of why your code is fast on a modern machine. The…

I'm pretty ignorant about this stuff, so please don't think I'm trolling.

I'm confused when you speak of a virtual machine with regard to C... can you explain what you mean by this?

I had to wikipedia the Burroughs machine. I guess the big deal is that it's a stack machine? It looks very interesting and I plan to read more about it. But I guess I don't understand why that is a hindrance to C.

The JVM is a stack machine, isn't it?

btw, I haven't read the article yet. It's my habit to check comments first to see if the article was interesting, and seeing your comment made me want to reply for clarification.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#75

Post by BenDaglish »

geophile wrote: post #46

C/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 th…

I have very much the same pre/history, along with years of Perl. Then I discovered Go, and can't recommend it highly enough for exactly the reasons and specific case you state.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#76

Post by borlak »

stcredzero wrote: post #8

1) Pick a popular language 2) Figure out something controversial to say about it and a justification for that 3) Write it up and post it to reddit, HN, &c 4) Enjoy the hits EDIT: Which is enabled by this - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5037649

Very true, but I do end up learning a lot from the HN discussions. I'm a C guy myself, but I try not to be biased. I always tell new programmers to try and not favor any language, as they all have their uses.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#77

Post by _yosefk »

madhadron wrote: post #53

Oh for heavens' sakes. Yet more ignorance. A more realistic view of C: - C is straightforward to compile into fast machine code...on a PDP-11. Its virtual machine does not match modern architectures very well, and its explicitness about details of its machine mean FORTRAN compilers typically produce faster code. The C virtual machine does not provide an accurate model of why your code is fast on a modern machine. The…

The article argued that C was effective in practice, not that it was better than X in some other sense. Would you prefer to write production code in FORTRAN, ALGOL 60 and 68, Turbo Pascal, or Smalltalk to writing it in C today?

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#79

Post by Evbn »

peterevans wrote: post #69
ryeguy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Here's the thing: "high-level", when applied to a programming language, has a historical context. It means something specific (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_programming_language ), and what it means and has always meant is that the language in question abstracts away registers and allows structured programming (as in, through the use of if, while, switch, for, as opposed to using labels and branching).…

Yes, and refusing to update (human) language in response to changes in the computing landscape is exactly the reason C fanatics don't see the weaknesses of C.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#80

Post by MichaelGG »

stcredzero wrote: post #54
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. One problem with the term "high level language," is that it was coined many, many decades ago. C is a "high level language" like FORTRAN is one. Remember, when C was invented, programming via punch cards was still a routine activity in many shops. This is why the assertion that, "C is a fantastic high level language," or even that it's a high level l…

It's not actually controversial, it's just arguing about the definition. Change the phrasing to "C is fantastic abstraction over the machine, but it's not in the same high level like, say, Erlang" and everyone agrees.

The article uses an old standard as a little trick to try to put C in a category it doesn't belong.

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