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This comment completely misses the point. C is not less complex than Python, Ruby, or even Haskell. In fact, it's much more complex. Complexity is here is not a

This comment completely misses the point. C is not less complex than Python, Ruby, or even Haskell. In fact, it's much more complex. Complexity is here is not about 'how easy is it to write something'. Complexity is rather 'can I express problems that are difficult to reason about'. It is impossible to express intractible problems in HTML. There are problems that simply cannot even be expressed in HTML. Contrast this to any of the turing complete languages, in which it is possible to express problems difficult to reason about. Python, ruby, julia, javascript, haskell, etc fall into this category. Now contrast this to the turing complete languages riddled with undefined behavior like C and C++. Your complextiy is inverted.

GoblinSlayer 4y ago
Problems difficult to reason about are big problems, so a big html document is such a problem.
- anon291 4y ago
  Nope. An html document is statically analyzable by simple tools. Html parsing is very easy. Html rendering difficult to code correctly but very straightforward. It is very easy to generate in bounded time the result of an html render. It is impossible to do that with C, haskell, rust, etc.
  - GoblinSlayer 4y ago
    An html engine is such a simple tool microsoft gave up making its own. C compilers available for a wide range of platforms is said to be due to simplicity of C.
kaba0 4y ago
I don’t think this notion of complexity is meaningful/well accepted. Languages have expressivity as a more-or-less accepted concept (in which C is very inexpressive, Haskell, Ruby etc. are very expressive), and language complexity as perhaps another, where the concepts of the language are taken into account. For example something like Idris with dependent types would be a quite complex language, while C may indeed be relatively simple. This is usually the inverse of expressivity. You seem to talk about the complexity of a program when written in a specific language. Here, a more expressive language would fair better, at usually the cost of a more complex language as mentioned above. But as we all know, essential complexity (of a problem) is non-reducible.

GoblinSlayer 4y ago

Problems difficult to reason about are big problems, so a big html document is such a problem.

anon291 4y ago
Nope. An html document is statically analyzable by simple tools. Html parsing is very easy. Html rendering difficult to code correctly but very straightforward. It is very easy to generate in bounded time the result of an html render. It is impossible to do that with C, haskell, rust, etc.
- GoblinSlayer 4y ago
  An html engine is such a simple tool microsoft gave up making its own. C compilers available for a wide range of platforms is said to be due to simplicity of C.

kaba0 4y ago

I don’t think this notion of complexity is meaningful/well accepted. Languages have expressivity as a more-or-less accepted concept (in which C is very inexpressive, Haskell, Ruby etc. are very expressive), and language complexity as perhaps another, where the concepts of the language are taken into account. For example something like Idris with dependent types would be a quite complex language, while C may indeed be relatively simple. This is usually the inverse of expressivity. You seem to talk about the complexity of a program when written in a specific language. Here, a more expressive language would fair better, at usually the cost of a more complex language as mentioned above. But as we all know, essential complexity (of a problem) is non-reducible.