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> high quality standard libraries, speed, good debugging facilities, being easy to learn, ability to handle large projects, and hardware support among other thi
by derleth 14y ago
> high quality standard libraries, speed, good debugging facilities, being easy to learn, ability to handle large projects, and hardware support among other things.
Hm. C has three, at most four of those desiderata. It lacks good debugging facilities, especially compared to what a real (Smalltalk or Lisp, for example) debugger can do, it is about as easy to learn as driving a car with manual transmission, manual steering, and inadequate brakes, and it is so lacking in support for programming in the large that people were willing to put up with 1990s-era C++.
So is C a toy?
- dchichkov 14y agoRight. And also this 'real' debugger would not be predictable, would crash, wouldn't work with my favorite environment, would be a hell to install, etc... No, thank you very much, good old GDB is fine with me.
- derleth 14y agoNone of those things are or were problems with Smalltalk and Lisp environments. You might as well rattle off the potential downsides of using a compiler instead of writing machine code by hand.
- kaffiene 14y agoDisagree. C has good debuggers - visual c++ is fine. In my opinion, C has all the features that the parent post was referring to (you might quibble about being easy to learn, but I'd also quibble whether a tool needs to be easy to learn)