5 ms·

My feeling is that at least in C++ and Haskell, what's going on is that a barebones language core is being extended with a teetering tower of mutually dependent

My feeling is that at least in C++ and Haskell, what's going on is that a barebones language core is being extended with a teetering tower of mutually dependent libraries building ever deeper abstractions. Templates upon templates, or monads upon monads. Whereas in Go, say, stuff like ranges and maps is just built in, no more abstraction than is necessary to do a generalist job with a few specialised common cases. Even the standard library is largely one-level, direct code, and only abstract at the interfaces. So simply and literally, C++ has to compile more lines of code to do the thing.

gumby 8y ago
This was of course one of the key differentiators of C; one of my favorite lines in the original K&R book was "what? I have to call a function to do I/O?" C was unusual that so much of it was in its libraries rather than being built in. Programming language design in those days didn't have the clean differentiation we have today.. or perhaps did: it's fascinating to see the arc bend back.
- JulianMorrison 8y ago
  Being in libraries or in the language isn't so much the thing, because really the language is just calling into a hidden library. It's more being directly written, versus being composed of Legos that are themselves composed of Legos... that ends up drawing in a hundred thousand lines of ultra generalist code and then pre-specializing it.
- int_19h 8y ago
  It predates C tho. In Simula-67, not only I/O was in functions, it was in methods (on file objects). In Pascal, it was also all functions, also some of those were magic (e.g. overloaded on types, in a way user-defined functions couldn't be) - but it still described them as functions.
  - gumby 8y ago
    I said unusual not unique, but perhaps I should have been clearer. Pascal and C were definitely influenced by Simula, a language ahead of its time. When K&R wrote that line I suspect they were thinking more of PL/1 which was the Multics implementation language. Though it has OPEN/CLOSE etc they were keywords not external labels. I think it’s pretty likely K had heard of Pascal at the time. More interestingly BCPL’s i/o was via library rather than innate. And c descends directly from BCPL (->b->c) rather than from PL/1; simula-67 and BCPL were developed contemporaneously in Europe. Again, apologies for my prior brevity.

gumby 8y ago

This was of course one of the key differentiators of C; one of my favorite lines in the original K&R book was "what? I have to call a function to do I/O?" C was unusual that so much of it was in its libraries rather than being built in. Programming language design in those days didn't have the clean differentiation we have today.. or perhaps did: it's fascinating to see the arc bend back.

JulianMorrison 8y ago
Being in libraries or in the language isn't so much the thing, because really the language is just calling into a hidden library. It's more being directly written, versus being composed of Legos that are themselves composed of Legos... that ends up drawing in a hundred thousand lines of ultra generalist code and then pre-specializing it.
int_19h 8y ago
It predates C tho. In Simula-67, not only I/O was in functions, it was in methods (on file objects). In Pascal, it was also all functions, also some of those were magic (e.g. overloaded on types, in a way user-defined functions couldn't be) - but it still described them as functions.
- gumby 8y ago
  I said unusual not unique, but perhaps I should have been clearer. Pascal and C were definitely influenced by Simula, a language ahead of its time. When K&R wrote that line I suspect they were thinking more of PL/1 which was the Multics implementation language. Though it has OPEN/CLOSE etc they were keywords not external labels. I think it’s pretty likely K had heard of Pascal at the time. More interestingly BCPL’s i/o was via library rather than innate. And c descends directly from BCPL (->b->c) rather than from PL/1; simula-67 and BCPL were developed contemporaneously in Europe. Again, apologies for my prior brevity.