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I think the author's point is that despite being perceived as low-level, C doesn't really differ from, say, Java on the last bullet. In other words, a programm
by dgreensp 8y ago
I think the author's point is that despite being perceived as low-level, C doesn't really differ from, say, Java on the last bullet.
In other words, a programmer who sits down and uses C and not Java might think, "I am being forced to pay attention to irrelevant things and think in unnatural ways, but that's because I am writing fast code using operations that map to operations done by the physical machine. In a higher-level language like Java, more of these details are out of my control because they are abstracted away by the language and handled by the compiler."
I think the article does a great job dismantling this point of view, and telling the story that C is not so different from Java, aside from being unsafe and ill-specified.
- zkomp 8y agoMaybe true but I think the Java example is not that good. Java is still not that different from C. Java is more like a decendant to C and C++ - and to be honest both languages force you to pay attention to lots of irrelevant "low-level" detail, fictionally low-level since its not actually the machine but language itself (that is stuck in the PDP11 mental mode...) Compared to something different like Erlang, Haskell, Lisp
- dgreensp 8y agoHigh-level and low-level are relative, to be sure, but Java is definitely considered higher-level than C -- it was designed to target a virtual machine, for example, while C was designed to target real machines -- so I think it illustrates the article's point perfectly.