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Actually serious bug detection and prevention is not bad in C either. Most C code uses very well accepted design patterns which is very readable to a seasoned C

by arihant 11y ago

Actually serious bug detection and prevention is not bad in C either. Most C code uses very well accepted design patterns which is very readable to a seasoned C programmer. Haskell and OCaml are better at easy reasoning of correctness of a program. Serious C bugs are around performance and security, not correctness. The thing is, what a C programmer would consider a serious bug pertaining to performance and security, would not be fixable by Haskell being a better syntax. Ultimately it's the compiler that would bear the onus. Now generic compilers would always have performance issues and can't make everyone happy. That's the real problem here. It's easy to fix serious bugs (from perspective of systems programmers) in C than to fix them in Haskell. You have no control over compiled code or how it's going to turn out. The so called weirdness of C arises from the fact that non-seasoned C programmer do not understand why a C programmer is doing something. A weird C syntax usually is a signal to the compiler to write instruction code in a certain way. It's not about correctness that a lot of C programmers are worried about. Well, at least not more than other languages. What we're worried about is what happens when rubber hits the road. It's very hard to do that from the driver's seat. Even Go, which tries to be closer to metal has issues around this. Things like Go, Obj-C, Swift are great where you simply want performance of machine code. But that's not the major argument to use C.

deleted 11y ago
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jernfrost 11y ago
You seem to be talking about a very specific area. As I've eluded to earlier, there are clearly jobs where C is best suited, but C is hardly the best choice in most of the areas it is used. People are still doing GUI programming in C. That is a really poor fit for the language. C isn't automatically easier to achieve high performance. Depends on what sort of problems we are talking about. If I remember correctly CouchDB was written in C/C++ originally and they switched to Erlang and got both much less code and higher performance. But in something like a game engine were you want to be able to control memory layout and allocation C/C++ is a benefit. But Rust/Swift/Go allows you to do much of the same to various degrees. At my work people write codecs and stuff and C is clearly a benefit due to its closeness to the metal. And as you say, yes they do write odd code at times because they know a lot about how the C compiler translates various constructs to assembly code. But this is specialist work. Most C coding doesn't involve this type of coding. I think I just have to agree to disagree with you about correctness though. I had several years of C experience when I first tried Standard ML, and I manage to get a sorting algorithm correct on first try in SML, something I've never done in C. There will always be some stupid off by one type of error. People have conducted studies of these sort of things and tend to measure better results for functional languages. One notable property of C programs is also that for any group of C programmers there is a huge variation in performance of the programs they write. The top C developers beat anybody. But average C programs are often slower than even average Python programs.

by arihant 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

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jernfrost 11y ago

You seem to be talking about a very specific area. As I've eluded to earlier, there are clearly jobs where C is best suited, but C is hardly the best choice in most of the areas it is used. People are still doing GUI programming in C. That is a really poor fit for the language. C isn't automatically easier to achieve high performance. Depends on what sort of problems we are talking about. If I remember correctly CouchDB was written in C/C++ originally and they switched to Erlang and got both much less code and higher performance. But in something like a game engine were you want to be able to control memory layout and allocation C/C++ is a benefit. But Rust/Swift/Go allows you to do much of the same to various degrees. At my work people write codecs and stuff and C is clearly a benefit due to its closeness to the metal. And as you say, yes they do write odd code at times because they know a lot about how the C compiler translates various constructs to assembly code. But this is specialist work. Most C coding doesn't involve this type of coding. I think I just have to agree to disagree with you about correctness though. I had several years of C experience when I first tried Standard ML, and I manage to get a sorting algorithm correct on first try in SML, something I've never done in C. There will always be some stupid off by one type of error. People have conducted studies of these sort of things and tend to measure better results for functional languages. One notable property of C programs is also that for any group of C programmers there is a huge variation in performance of the programs they write. The top C developers beat anybody. But average C programs are often slower than even average Python programs.