[wmii] Re: 10kloc project, wmii maintainer change

On 7/20/06, Tianran Chen <chentia1_AT_msu.edu> wrote:
> Geoffrey Alan Washburn writes:
>
> > Why don't I try educating "him"? Because I don't have time to teach
> > people things they really should have learned elsewhere? Because I don't
> > really have time for a debate I'll never win? Because people have an
> > unfortunate tendency to stick to their chosen ideology regardless of the
> > quality of the argument? Until people go out and start learning and using
> > other languages and tools, I doubt there is much I can do to convince them
> > of anything because there is no shared context. Furthermore, until
> > someone has actually tried doing something different and found it lacking,
> > they have no argument. So making uneducated claims about the utility of
> > C, without knowing anything else, means you've already lost the argument.
>
> I was a professional Haskell & ML programmer for 2 years, and also did one
> project in Erlang. Am I qualified to be educated by you? Can you tell me at
> least one thing you cannot be done in C but can be in these (or similar)
> languages? Except for tail-recursion, please.

Funny thing is, most, if not all, implementations of those languages
are written in... guess what? C. Talk about hypocrisy.

Erlang and Limbo are really great languages, but C still has its
place, and while some syntactical sugar can make some things easier,
like the special channel syntax in Limbo that makes concurrency much
more idiomatic, C still has libthread[1] that provides all the same
features.

The main problem with C is that as one of the most popular languages
in history, almost every one writing C have no clue whatsoever what
they are doing, and that goes from the kids on LSD at Berkeley in the
80's to the Gnome hippies with their glib abominations.

But at the same time some of the greatest hackers in history, like
Henry Spencer and Ken Thompson, have produced some of the most clean,
elegant and beautiful pieces of code using C.

Reading the Lions Book should be required for every person before they
even think about writing a single line of code, in any language.

uriel

[1]: http://swtch.com/~rsc/thread/
Received on Thu Jul 20 2006 - 18:31:24 UTC