Re: OT: Why is C so popular?
On Wed, 2003-08-27 at 20:58, Mark Roach wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-08-27 at 18:46, Gregory Seidman wrote:
> > On Wed, Aug 27, 2003 at 10:02:44PM +0200, Thomas Krennwallner wrote:
> [...]
> > }
> > } And that all doesn't matter if you're a free software developer...
> > } You use the tools YOU like, the language YOU think is the right one for
> > } your project and don't have to give a damn about other opinions why this
> > } or that language has to be better than the other.
> >
> > ...unless you are trying to build up a community of contributors around
> > your project, in which case you had better use a language that people who
> > are likely to want to contribute are likely to know. In that case, whatever
> > has taken the world by storm is probably a good choice, assuming it is even
> > a reasonable fit to the task.
>
> Good point. Sawfish was essentially maintainerless for quite some time
> due in large part to a lack of developers familiar with lisp, or maybe
> it was the particular dialect of lisp (scheme?, rep?). I would imagine
The same thing is happening now with gnucash, which is partly written
in Guile.
Guile is a Scheme implementation designed for real world programming,
providing a rich Unix interface, a module system, an interpreter, and
many extension languages. Guile can be used as a standard #! style
interpreter, via #!/usr/bin/guile, or as an extension language for
other applications via libguile.
> that projects written in fortran/tcl/ruby would also have fewer people
> in the community with the experience to contribute than comparable
> programs written in C/Perl/Python.
>
> Not that it detracts from the value of the languages themselves, just
> that, for community-driven projects, finding a large(ish) potential
> community is probably a good idea.
>
> At the risk of branching off in a bad direction, I sometimes wonder
> whether multi-language environments like .net and (someday) parrot will
> alleviate or aggravate this sort of problem. I can just imagine horrible
> programming monstrosities written partly in perl, partly in tcl, python,
> C, and java.
Decades ago, DEC published the DSRI (Digital Standard Run-time
Interface) for VMS. Thus, object files generated by the compiler
of any language that follows the DSRI spec (all of DEC/Compaq/HP's
compilers, of course, including C/C++, COBOL, FORTRAN, BASIC, Ada,
DIBOL, Bliss, MACRO, Pascal, etc, and compliant 3rd-party compilers)
can, and do, all link together into 1 executable.
As with most other of it's ideas, others are *finally* catching
up with DEC: GNU is, I believe, trying to do something similar with
the gnu compiler collection.
--
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Ron Johnson, Jr. ron.l.johnson@cox.net
Jefferson, LA USA
Thanks to the good people in Microsoft, a great deal of the data
that flows is dependent on one company. That is not a healthy
ecosystem. The issue is that creativity gets filtered through
the business plan of one company.
Mitchell Baker, "Chief Lizard Wrangler" at Mozilla
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