Re: OT: Why is C so popular?
On Wed, Aug 27, 2003 at 01:11:08AM -0500, Alex Malinovich wrote:
> The recent COBOL discussion has gotten me to thinking. Some languages
> seem to be very popular in some situations. C is easily the dominant
> language for most things Linux. So therein lies the question. Why,
> exactly, is C so popular? Especially in comparison to C++. I can't think
> of a single reason to use C instead of C++ for most of the coding that I
> would do. I generally only write user applications. I don't get anywhere
> near the kernel which is where I'd imagine most of the reason for using
> C comes in. Yet I see people writing 'modern' GUI applications and using
> C when I would think C++ would be a much better choice. Is there
> something that I'm missing? Something that C actually does better than
> C++ in regards to higher-level functions?
First convince me that object oriented programming results in
maintainable and debuggable code, then convince me that C++ is a good
implementation of OO, and then I might consider C++ instead of C. (I
know not all the features of C++ are related to OO, but OO seems to be
the main selling point of C++ vs C)
> (Note that I tend to gravitate towards higher level languages by nature.
> I use Perl religiously, and I love Java. If not for some of the speed
> limitations and, more importantly, the fact that it's non-free, I would
> say that Java is the perfect language. Hmm... is that gasoline I smell?
> :)
Have you ever looked at an operator precedence table for Java ? One line
says : "+, -, +" (the last + is for string concatenation). Add to this
the principle of strong typing and giving compilation erros whenever you
omit an explicit cast, except of course if the first variable might be a
string and strings are so cool so we convert everything else to a
string... Whoever thought that was a good idea should be shot.
Java makes strings expensive and easy to use at the same time, and that
is not a good idea. And it is OO ;-)
Frank
>
> --
> Alex Malinovich
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