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If programming languages were Harry Potter characters

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Re: If programming languages were Harry Potter characters

#11

Post by moron4hire »

tux3 wrote: post #8

I'm surprised that people consider C a dead language. C is very much one of the most used and needed language in the world, especially if the Internet of Things hype keeps on getting stronger. And of course all the current billions of lines of C didn't just disappear to be replaced by Python ( as much as I like Python). Your OS and core programs are still getting new versions from times to times, even if you don't di…

I understand what you're saying, but I wouldn't say it's all that surprising that people think that way. Annoying, but not surprising. People also think the mobile web will kill desktops and laptops and that there is no use for native applications.

Re: If programming languages were Harry Potter characters

#12

Post by nathell »

ununun wrote: post #3

What about Lisps? Also, it would be interesting to read about comparisons between programming languages and naturals ones. What's the most elegant natural language in the world that could be said to be the Scheme of natural languages?

Classical Chinese.

Re: If programming languages were Harry Potter characters

#15

Post by kyllo »

tux3 wrote: post #8

I'm surprised that people consider C a dead language. C is very much one of the most used and needed language in the world, especially if the Internet of Things hype keeps on getting stronger. And of course all the current billions of lines of C didn't just disappear to be replaced by Python ( as much as I like Python). Your OS and core programs are still getting new versions from times to times, even if you don't di…

C was supposed to be replaced by C++ a long time ago, but a lot of systems programmers, particularly in open source, have reverted back to vanilla C because C++ is too complicated or provides abstractions that are not needed for the problem. But on the Windows platform C++ has mostly replaced C, and on the Mac / OSX platform Objective-C has basically replaced C.

There are a few other newer systems programming languages like D, Go, and Nim, but these all have garbage collection and so are unsuitable for many of the use cases for C/C++. I understand D and Nim allow you to turn GC off, but then you also lose memory safety so it's equivalent to using C++ from that perspective.

I believe Rust is the most promising new systems programming language because its compiler enforces memory safety without garbage collection. But it's just recently hit 1.0 so it may be a while before it becomes very widely adopted.

Re: If programming languages were Harry Potter characters

#19

Post by marrs »

kyllo wrote: post #15
tux3 wrote: post #8

I'm surprised that people consider C a dead language. C is very much one of the most used and needed language in the world, especially if the Internet of Things hype keeps on getting stronger. And of course all the current billions of lines of C didn't just disappear to be replaced by Python ( as much as I like Python). Your OS and core programs are still getting new versions from times to times, even if you don't di…

C was supposed to be replaced by C++ a long time ago, but a lot of systems programmers, particularly in open source, have reverted back to vanilla C because C++ is too complicated or provides abstractions that are not needed for the problem. But on the Windows platform C++ has mostly replaced C, and on the Mac / OSX platform Objective-C has basically replaced C. There are a few other newer systems programming languag…

    But it's just recently hit 1.0
As an alpha only. It's still much too unstable to be able to do anything serious with it.
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