Re: OT: Why is C so popular?
On Wednesday 27 August 2003 12:43, Frank Gevaerts wrote:
> 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)
I agree, but when it comes to documentation c is the absolute top.
man strchr, man strlen, man strcmp, man sin, man cos it's all in the manuals
but try do get a description from some of the functions from the C++ STL out
of the manpage. It is hardly possible to code C++ and use the features
(vector, list, queue and more of those prety things) without buying some dead
trees.
C is perfectly commented in the manpages, php has php.net, java has the api
documentation, perl has perldoc and c++ has /dev/null (i know the first
remark is that all c functions that are commented are part of of c++ and you
have a piece).
--
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