12 ms·

Absolutely agree. After I began learning Ada, I could never look at C the same way again. It's an incredibly fluid and intuitive language that shines in the are

by ajxs 7y ago

Absolutely agree. After I began learning Ada, I could never look at C the same way again. It's an incredibly fluid and intuitive language that shines in the areas that C has dominated, without any of the pitfalls that make serious development in C so difficult. It's very easy to see why it remains the language of choice for life-critical applications.

pjmlp 7y ago
Now imagine those of us that already knew Turbo Basic, Turbo Pascal, Modula-2, before seeing C for the first time. Naturally we weren't tainted by the myth that C was the very first systems language and we knew there was a better way. Morry Worm is 30 years old by the way.
- jstewartmobile 7y ago
  My mother bought the family a PC back in the early 90s. She was working on a masters degree, and her coursework required it. I taught myself Turbo Pascal on that machine. Loved it! Years later I started college (originally majoring in CS), and they taught their courses in C++. I read the manual cover-to-cover and finished out the course, just to give it a fair shot. Wasted time though. To know it is to loathe it. At the end of the course, changed my major to computer engineering and never looked back. Wirth languages are where it's at!
  - kazinator 7y ago
    Turilli's Modula-3 was a good job, I think. The distributed version of CVS (the version control system) called DCVS is written in Modula-3.
- kazinator 7y ago
  I had lots of experience in Modula-2 and Pascal (including Turbo Pascal) before C. I liked C very much. The very syntax was a breath of fresh air; just } to close scopes and so on. The declarations that resembled uses of the identifier looked good to me. Good old Don Knuth had a similar reaction (also coming from lots of experience in Pascal, Algol and their ilk). In a 1993 interview he said this: I think C has a lot of features that are very important. The way C handles pointers, for example, was a brilliant innovation; it solved a lot of problems that we had before in data structuring and made the programs look good afterwards. C isn't the perfect language, no language is, but I think it has a lot of virtues, and you can avoid the parts you don't like. I do like C as a language, especially because it blends in with the operating system (if you're using UNIX, for example). I don't entirely agree with him but sympathize with the reaction. (No you can't avoid the bits you don't like, unless you're a lone hacker who doesn't have to integrate any third party-code, which pretty much describes Knuth.)
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    To each its own I guess. For me, C versus Turbo Pascal 6.0 just felt backwards, thankfully the professor that was giving us C classes, also made a C++ compiler available on the school lab. So given the choice of C vs C++, when coming from Wirth's school of type safety, the option was obvious.

by ajxs 7y ago

pjmlp 7y ago

Now imagine those of us that already knew Turbo Basic, Turbo Pascal, Modula-2, before seeing C for the first time. Naturally we weren't tainted by the myth that C was the very first systems language and we knew there was a better way. Morry Worm is 30 years old by the way.

jstewartmobile 7y ago
My mother bought the family a PC back in the early 90s. She was working on a masters degree, and her coursework required it. I taught myself Turbo Pascal on that machine. Loved it! Years later I started college (originally majoring in CS), and they taught their courses in C++. I read the manual cover-to-cover and finished out the course, just to give it a fair shot. Wasted time though. To know it is to loathe it. At the end of the course, changed my major to computer engineering and never looked back. Wirth languages are where it's at!
- kazinator 7y ago
  Turilli's Modula-3 was a good job, I think. The distributed version of CVS (the version control system) called DCVS is written in Modula-3.
kazinator 7y ago
I had lots of experience in Modula-2 and Pascal (including Turbo Pascal) before C. I liked C very much. The very syntax was a breath of fresh air; just } to close scopes and so on. The declarations that resembled uses of the identifier looked good to me. Good old Don Knuth had a similar reaction (also coming from lots of experience in Pascal, Algol and their ilk). In a 1993 interview he said this: I think C has a lot of features that are very important. The way C handles pointers, for example, was a brilliant innovation; it solved a lot of problems that we had before in data structuring and made the programs look good afterwards. C isn't the perfect language, no language is, but I think it has a lot of virtues, and you can avoid the parts you don't like. I do like C as a language, especially because it blends in with the operating system (if you're using UNIX, for example). I don't entirely agree with him but sympathize with the reaction. (No you can't avoid the bits you don't like, unless you're a lone hacker who doesn't have to integrate any third party-code, which pretty much describes Knuth.)
- pjmlp 7y ago
  To each its own I guess. For me, C versus Turbo Pascal 6.0 just felt backwards, thankfully the professor that was giving us C classes, also made a C++ compiler available on the school lab. So given the choice of C vs C++, when coming from Wirth's school of type safety, the option was obvious.