Re: Our Most Precious Resource: Programmer Time (was Re: long term goals)

[phil@bolthole.com (Philip Brown)]

[ Chip Salzenberg writes ]
> ....
> You may wonder: What should be used for applications instead of C?
> Well, frankly, almost anything except Intercal would be an
> improvement.  My app languages of choice are Perl and ANSI C++.

Bah. Both of those have the potential for severe horrors.
Perl more than most anything else out there.

WELL-WRITTEN C code is better than badly or even mediocre most anything
else.

I was introduced to the mindbending concept that with ANSI C, it is
possible to write in a object oriented fashion. Using pure C, not
any odd "lets use macros to pretend we're something else" hack.

This was extremely difficult for me to accept, after having learned C++
already ;-)

Hint: it has to do with the fact that you can use typedefs for
"struct foo *"
without ever having defined what "struct foo" is.



> I can only hope that the OS community will finally wake up to the
> hidden costs of C before too much more time is lost.

Or maybe grow up and learn how to code better.

One of the not-so-hidden costs of C++, is that there was no standard
mangling scheme for linking, for a long long time.
Is there one now, even?