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> So, before writing about the glories of C, please go familiarize yourself with modern FORTRAN, ALGOL 60 and 68, Turbo Pascal's compiler and environment, a goo
by woodchuck64 14y ago
> So, before writing about the glories of C, please go familiarize yourself with modern FORTRAN, ALGOL 60 and 68, Turbo Pascal's compiler and environment, a good Smalltalk like Squeak or Pharo, and the state of modern pipelines processor architectures.
All true, but how are you going to implement a single project using just the best parts of FORTRAN, ALGOL 60, Turbo Pascal and Smalltalk?
- madhadron 14y agoYes, and that's the tragedy of it all...and the real reason everyone uses C. It's not that C is a well designed language appropriate for highly optimized compiling, with wonderful tooling and an elegant standard library that takes care of the difficult or insecure or repetitive tasks. It's that I used to be able to sit down at any Unix machine in the world, shove some code into an editor, call some system libraries, get it to compile, and maybe even step through it in a debugger, and go home at the end of the day, and I could do that because that's what its designers were doing with it, so they made sure that all of it at least functioned at a good enough level to get through the day. Not always anymore, since a lot of Linux distributions no longer install the C compiler by default.
- chipsy 14y agoThe fact that is it "not always anymore" may be a blessing in disguise. The focus of attention in the last decade or so has been all around heavier, VM-centric languages like Java or Ruby, but opportunities for new systems programming technology are coming up more often these days.