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Sean misses the irony that he would have given up on writing a lot of software if he tried to do it in Ada rather than C. I think C is an excellent and useful

Sean misses the irony that he would have given up on writing a lot of software if he tried to do it in Ada rather than C. I think C is an excellent and useful language which doesn't attempt to change the way you program. While one can argue that one shouldn't be able to compile mistakes; the cost of avoiding mistakes often exceeds the cost of amending them. A sort of personal “It's easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission” situation. I often ponder whether the time I spend debugging C programs is worth it. Each time I conclude that I wouldn't have bothered to write it without C.

PeCaN 10y ago
It depends what you're writing. I wrote an incremental generational garbage collector in C, and rather regretted the time I spent debugging it. If I wanted it to be at all concurrent, I think I would've given up doing it in C. Right tool for the right job and all that. But lately I've strongly been preferring Rust, Ada, and ATS for anything I'd use C for.
- microcolonel 10y ago
  Fair enough, I do like ATS as well; but there are a lot of programs which are just too frustrating to write at all without being paid a lot of money for a decade.
pjmlp 10y ago
Somehow I managed to write lots of software between 1986 and 1993, the year I used C for the first time with Turbo C 2.0 for MS-DOS. Turbo Basic, Turbo Pascal, Modula-2 did the job just fine.
- microcolonel 10y ago
  No disagreement here. :-) Turbo Pascal, Turbo BASIC, and Modula-2 don't have any of the ugly formality of Ada though. I'm not making the point that C and C alone is the only language less frustrating than Ada. I'm saying that for many systems, the comfort and simplicity of C allow you to solve problems which would be too frustrating to solve in Ada. I find Modula-2 pretty dreamy; it's a shame that it's mostly dead.
  - Animats 10y ago
    I used to use Modula 2 for embedded work on small CPUs. It's hard to get programs to compile, but then they usually work. This is important when your target doesn't have much debug capability.

PeCaN 10y ago

It depends what you're writing. I wrote an incremental generational garbage collector in C, and rather regretted the time I spent debugging it. If I wanted it to be at all concurrent, I think I would've given up doing it in C. Right tool for the right job and all that. But lately I've strongly been preferring Rust, Ada, and ATS for anything I'd use C for.

microcolonel 10y ago
Fair enough, I do like ATS as well; but there are a lot of programs which are just too frustrating to write at all without being paid a lot of money for a decade.

pjmlp 10y ago

Somehow I managed to write lots of software between 1986 and 1993, the year I used C for the first time with Turbo C 2.0 for MS-DOS. Turbo Basic, Turbo Pascal, Modula-2 did the job just fine.

microcolonel 10y ago
No disagreement here. :-) Turbo Pascal, Turbo BASIC, and Modula-2 don't have any of the ugly formality of Ada though. I'm not making the point that C and C alone is the only language less frustrating than Ada. I'm saying that for many systems, the comfort and simplicity of C allow you to solve problems which would be too frustrating to solve in Ada. I find Modula-2 pretty dreamy; it's a shame that it's mostly dead.
- Animats 10y ago
  I used to use Modula 2 for embedded work on small CPUs. It's hard to get programs to compile, but then they usually work. This is important when your target doesn't have much debug capability.