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> I dearly love Python because it allows me to work at levels of abstraction that are meaningful to the user's problem. I dearly love C when I want to wiggle a

by ryao 11y ago

> I dearly love Python because it allows me to work at levels of abstraction that are meaningful to the user's problem. I dearly love C when I want to wiggle a pin on an ARM Cortex-M3 What keeps you from wriggling that pin in Python? Turing completeness dictates that any Turing complete language is equivalent to any other Turing complete language. In addition, you can do high levels of abstraction in C. The preprocessor and void pointers allow you to do some rather nice things. Structured programming also let you build things up. The advantage that Python enjoys is that it comes with a large number of library functions already provided and there are easily discoverable third party libraries. There are other differences, although every difference has a trade off. Garbage collection bloats memory requirements. Being interpreted means errors that can be caught in advance at compile time occur at runtime.

dbcurtis 11y ago
> What keeps you from wriggling that pin in Python? Did you catch that "Cortex-M3" part after "ARM"? No MMU, no OS, very limited SRAM -- CPython doesn't go there. I am, however, a huge fan of MicroPython, but that discussion too OT for this thread.
bo1024 11y ago
> Turing completeness dictates that any Turing complete language is equivalent to any other Turing complete language. Sorry to pick on you, but this is a good example of misuse of this fact in an argument where it's not really relevant. Turing-completeness only relates to functions that take some string as input as produce a string as output (since that's all the turing machine model can do). In contrast, real-world programming languages interact with a machine or operating system, and not all languages provide the same interfaces or even run on the same machines. I can easily implement a Turing-complete language whose only allowed system calls are reading from stdin and writing to stdout. Despite being Turing-complete, it will never be able to spawn threads, connect to a network socket, or even allocate memory on the heap.

by ryao 11y ago

dbcurtis 11y ago

> What keeps you from wriggling that pin in Python? Did you catch that "Cortex-M3" part after "ARM"? No MMU, no OS, very limited SRAM -- CPython doesn't go there. I am, however, a huge fan of MicroPython, but that discussion too OT for this thread.

bo1024 11y ago

> Turing completeness dictates that any Turing complete language is equivalent to any other Turing complete language. Sorry to pick on you, but this is a good example of misuse of this fact in an argument where it's not really relevant. Turing-completeness only relates to functions that take some string as input as produce a string as output (since that's all the turing machine model can do). In contrast, real-world programming languages interact with a machine or operating system, and not all languages provide the same interfaces or even run on the same machines. I can easily implement a Turing-complete language whose only allowed system calls are reading from stdin and writing to stdout. Despite being Turing-complete, it will never be able to spawn threads, connect to a network socket, or even allocate memory on the heap.