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Posted on 05/31/2010 7:32:31 PM PDT by Gomez
How about perl or Fortran 77? /hijack>
Hmmm, Well, I’ve not really had much experience with Fortran.
Pearl, however, seems to be more of a wrapper for regular-expressions... and if we REALLY wanted to do string-/pattern-manipulation wouldn’t we be using Snobol?
I've been programming since around 1970 (details here if you're curious), and ranged from FORTRAN to PDP8 assembler to 6800/6502/6809 assembler to BASIC to C (around 1984), and while I've used a handful of others since (including a bit of ADA), I have pretty much considered C my favorite language for the past 25 years.
By and large, I'd say that your criticisms of the language are accurate. In my view, some of the shortcomings derive from the fact that C was really not intended as a true high-level language -- and I personally view it as a portable glorified assembly language (which FORTRAN is also, BTW). I don't see that as a condemnation, since there are many valid uses for such languages, especially in the writing of operating system code. Pretty awful for applications, though, IMO.
Some other of the shortcomings are easy enough to address (for example, I always:
#define EQ ==
to avoid the == vs. = errors, but you are absolutely correct that it's an unfortunate aspect of the language.
The "responsibility of the programmer" is an interesting criticism. As above, it's true. But I don't personally see that as a drawback, being possessed of a professional ethic that demands that I take responsibility for everything that I do, whether I do every step myself or the compiler or other tool does some steps for me. But then, I LIKE assembler -- I'm an out-lying data point.
So I won't take issue with you on your dislike of the Unix/C design philosophy (and besides, I wasn't setting you up for an argument), but I'll say that it's possible to hold a valid point of view that embraces at least some of the very things you find distasteful.
As to whether it produces an inferior product... that's an interesting study. Certainly, in a marketplace where time-to-market is everything, and engineering design time is compressed, tools that do your thinking for you will produce a less buggy product than tools which let you shoot yourself in the foot.
I'll note that Unix and C were born around 1970, and in the ensuing 40 years a lot of other operating systems and languages have come and gone. Certain aspects of Unix design have proven themselves correct and robust, and prevailed despite some brilliant competition.
My belief is that the Windows family of OSes has survived into the 21st century more by the momentum (some would say inertia) granted by its overwhelming marketshare, than by its design philosophy, which has had to undergo multiple changes and at least one total reversal (which produced XP-SP2 and Vista/Win7) to deal with its earlier utter lack of design security.
I'm currently using Win7 very happily (I didn't think Microsoft could beat XP but Win7 does). I also use OS-X and NetBSD and Solaris and Linux, and don't get into flame wars. I'll be interested to see whether Windows or Unix (in the form of OS-X) goes down first. I hope to live long enough to see the Y2K38 32-bit unsigned clock rollover (I'll be 86), and observe which operating systems are still current then.
I think you make a good point concerning a product that the user can not just use, but "use effectively". It's a good metric. I appreciate the time and thought you put into your answer, and you've given me a couple things to think about. Thanks much, and have a great evening!
> ...Y2K38 32-bit unsigned clock rollover...
"signed". I'm tired, going to bed now... :)
“Pearl, however, seems to be more of a wrapper for regular-expressions..” [excerpt]You have GOT to be joking.
“When I am done with wok at the end of the day, it is turned off !”
So are you at work now, or home?
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No, I’d call that largely accurate for those of us who were programming when Perl was first turned loose in the Unix world. It really started as regex searches with a little bit of scripting glued around them.
There’s lots of evidence in Perl over the years that it never really had a “big picture design” of what it wanted to be as a programming language.
All of your criticisms of C are correct and spot-on. As dayglored NB’s, C wasn’t really ever intended as a HOL - I always maintain that C was little more than a high-level assembler for PDP-11’s. Using the V7 Unix or DECUS C compiler on RT-11/RSX, I could always look at a line of C source code and in my head, I knew what the resulting PDP-11 assembly code would look like. With only eight registers, and SP, PC being taken up, and R0 being used for results, it was only the allocation of R1 through R5 that were in question. The sequence of instructions was always largely no surprise.
Let me offer you an alternate interpretation of history, tho:
The world latched onto C because the world of software was being distracted by goddamn academics like Wirth and his nerds. We spent no short number of hours in the late 70’s and early 80’s learning such twaddle as Pascal. Why?
Because academics hated FORTRAN and the “GOTO” culture. And they hated COBOL even more.
Sure, there were F77 pre-processors out there that implemented all manner of “structured programming” as well as Pascal (MORTRAN was my favorite, with WATFIV from Waterloo being a good teaching language), but the upshot was, the universities were turning out graduates that had extensive backgrounds in a language which, if implemented the way Wirth intended, you could not even save the object deck from a compilation.
OOoooooo... what a lot of use *that* was. Compile-load-n-go. Great for teaching. Utterly useless for industry.
So for industry, what were the academics coming up with? Stuff like Pascal on one end, Ada on the other. We dispatched Pascal above, but what about Ada?
Well, the language was good, and addressed a lot of real-world programming issues, but it suffered from the absurd PR self-defeat of the NYU compiler - a compiler implemented in SETL, which compiled about THREE LINES A MINUTE on an 11/780. Good grief, when I was an experienced guy by the late 80’s, I could hand-compile just about any of my languages on a VAX, PDP-11 or AT&T 3B2 almost as fast.
So Ada got a huge black eye. When compiler companies finally did come out with real compilers, they attached absurd price tags to them - I remember calling up one Ada vendor when I still worked in the defense industry and asking them “How much for a multi-user installation on a VAX 11/780?”
$40,000.
I could buy every language that DEC made and have money left over for that amount.
OK, so remember what the computer vendors’ ‘solutions’ were back then? One language after another. And every one of them incompatible with the other guys’ compilers - with two exceptions: FORTRAN-77 and COBOL. IBM’s PL/I was a formidable language that could, in theory and practice, do it all. But it was a hugely complicated language, and no one else’s compiler was compatible with IBM’s. Cornell put out PL/C because they thought PL/I was too complicated. More time wasted.
So into this vacuum of leadership came Unix and C - sure, they were a moby hack. But the price was right - real low or nothing. Moreover, when you ported Unix, you also got a whole suite of tools that came with it. Tools that were arguably useful for programmers, without having to cough up another snootfull of cash.
When the GNU C compiler started getting ported around, it was all over. Here was a for-real compiler, with all the source code and documentation on how to port it to a new chipset. The future was pretty much sealed at that point.
The problem for most software people until very recently was this:
The better higher-order languages didn’t “do” low-level hardware manipulation well, if at all.
The best low-level structured system programming languages were proprietary - eg, BLISS, PL/S, etc.
So, while I agree and sympathize with your perspective on C, I can’t agree that it was only K&R that foist this upon us. There were a whole lot of us who were under the gun to crank out product in the last 30+ years who had to find a way to deliver said product. And the better higher-order languages simply were not going to get the job done. It wasn’t until Ada’95 that I could say that Ada was a language that could really take on hardware manipulation and system programming. The most recent changes to Ada really make it a much better language than it ever has been to be able to control hardware in “real world” cases.
To this day, the languages I’d really like to use (Lisp, SmallTalk-80, etc) are still completely ignorant of low-level hardware without significant extensions. Pascal is still as dopey as it ever was, the successor languages (Modula, Oberon) are still out in the academic weeds. COBOL and FORTRAN are still masters of their domains because many of the language bigots in academic settings turn up their noses at the very problem space itself - the academic community still has their head completely up their pompous asses where business programming is concerned, and ignores the problem space almost completely. FORTRAN is doing a little bit better, if only because electrical engineers and physics jocks like to point out that there is not yet another language that handles complex math as well as FORTRAN.
So we got C - because it was cheap, it was there, and it could be massaged into doing what we wanted to do, even if it looked like crap while we were doing it.
And the whole world is poorer and less secure for it.
Now we’re pissing an inordinate amount of time and money down a seemingly bottomless pit, trying to retrofit sound code generation and data structures into C - We now have C++, C#, C-, Objective-C, blah, blah, blah. All of which is like trying to polish a turd and then pick it up from the clean end.
I think I’ll go to bed now, before I become depressed and go get drunk.
One should understand the arguments for using Windows are all situational assessments. Usually you have to use Windows because you use Windows and are dependent on some Windows-only software and system administrators who only know how to do Windows.
Well not surprised, Windows has been “hacked” so many times, it is no surprise that Google is moving its employees over to either Linux or Mac. It is an issue of Windows having a weak computer security system.
Plus Google wants to “make peace” with the Apple founder, Steve Jobs, because if my memory is correct, Mr. Jobs was upset early this year over Google and its introduction of its Android cell phone product, because it will provide direct competition to the iPhone.
Please see post 33. Thanks!
Via the iPhone. Early this year, Steve Jobs was fit to be tied over Google’s decision to introduce Android, which when I had seen a commerical, looks very close to the iPhone.
Hi SmokingJoe!
Please see post 33! Thanks!
Kerrigan is a figure skater.
Kernigan is a C honcho.
There have been quite a few studies that have had Windows being more secure than Linux, and Win 7 has yet to lose to OSX in any security tests.
Hacker: Windows More Secure Than Mac OS X.8:21 PM - September 21, 2009 by Marcus Yam - source: Tom’s Hardware US .
Hackers just like the PC more.
Regardless of which side you’re on (though as a true computing enthusiast, you shouldn’t be taking sides), you’ve heard the arguments back and forth on the which operating system is truly safer – Mac OS X or Windows.
It is of the opinion of Charlie Miller, a well known Mac security guru, that even Snow Leopard, the latest version of Mac OS X, isn’t as safe as Windows.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/hack-windows-security-snow-leopard,8704.html
Study finds Windows more secure than Linux
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002182315_security17.html
interesting
Yet Mac when doing software reminders, they often do security upgrades.
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