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Will makes a dubious claim to support a dubious distinction. Plenty of large, complex infrastructure is written in Python. > Dynamic programming languages a
by legerdemain 4y ago
Will makes a dubious claim to support a dubious distinction. Plenty of large, complex infrastructure is written in Python.
> Dynamic programming languages are arguably still far from systems languages,
> since dynamic types and idioms like “ask forgiveness, not permission” are not
> conducive for good code quality.
I find it amusing that, when asked to give a defining characteristic of systems programming, key figures behind C++, Rust, D, and Go gave radically different and unrelated answers: "client applications," "resource-constrained applications," "cloud infrastructure," and "unsafe pointer casts."
If anything, a more practical definition is "only C and C++ are systems programming languages, by fiat, because it's an artificial category whose historical roots have long since lost pertinence."
- grumpyprole 4y ago> Plenty of large, complex infrastructure is written in Python. shudders
- fsckboy 4y agoI liked much of your critique, but you completely lost me with your last para. Systems programming is about adjudicating contention for system-constraints and system constrained resources. It's about creating relatively clean interfaces to relatively thorny problems. It's only lost apparent pertinance because of the explosion in numbers of people "coding" web front ends or other things at the top of the stack, and because the code that solves some of these problems is well understood and complete. But underneath all what we do in the various userspaces is the same and even greater complexity of problems which require maintenance and development/porting to new architectures as they get developed