Re: FW: OT: Why is C so popular?
Alphonse Ogulla <ogulla@uonbi.ac.ke> writes:
> C, Erlang, Prolog, Perl, Python and C++ are all refered to in the above
> paragraph. Java is conspicuouly not mentioned. I construe that to mean Java
> is so much lacking in useful qualities to serve any practical purpose.
Java is garbage-collected, and doesn't have a syntactically explicit
notion of pointers or references. This is actually fairly important
to me: the big reason I don't use C++ (aside from it having mutated
into something unrecognizable since I learned it 10 years ago) is that
I can't think about object lifetimes successfully, and don't want to
leak memory. Java saves me from doing that. Does calling f(o) make a
copy of the object o? In C++, it depends on whether f() takes a
reference parameter or not; in Java, the answer is always "no". (The
downside is that making a deep copy of an object is a pain.)
C++'s big benefit on GNU/Linux, though, is that there are good
runtimes that are Free. I've never had good luck using a JVM or class
library besides Sun's. This isn't a problem since I work in academia
right now, but I could see it being an issue in industry. For Java,
maintaining a CLASSPATH is also a big pain. But Java is what I'm
using right now, and I think I'm kind of glad that it's not C++.
--
David Maze dmaze@debian.org http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal."
-- Abra Mitchell
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