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> ...But there was a beauty to that. A simple mental model. A sense of control. There's something to that, I think. And it's still an open question whether the
by zozbot123 8y ago
> ...But there was a beauty to that. A simple mental model. A sense of control.
There's something to that, I think. And it's still an open question whether the newer languages that are in development at present will succeed in bringing some of that underlying "beauty" back. It's an important issue if we want lower-level programming to be more widely accessible.
(To clarify - the underlying machine model of C is beautifully simple, and newer low-level languages tend to be built on something very much like it anyway. The C language itself is frightfully complex - albeit less so than that other language in the C family that's often conflated with it.)
- ineedasername 8y agoI wonder if, now that processor speeds are increasing at a much slower rate, there will be a return to that lower level programming to focus on speed improvements through more efficient code.
- p1esk 8y agoI bet that's what some people were saying referring to assembly when C came out :)
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoPeople said it about assembly when it came out. The actual (binary or octal) machine codes gave you an intimacy with the hardware that assembly took away. (People actually said that.)
- p1esk 8y agoIf you like "intimacy with hardware" you can drop down one level below machine code and design a processor on an FPGA with Verilog. Or, to go even deeper, design a custom circuit with SPICE. C might be the optimal point on the abstraction ladder as far as the trade off between (exposed) complexity and control.
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoYou can go still lower. You can create custom transistors. You might even create custom semiconductor substrates... ... and there we stop. Nobody gets to create custom atoms.