as an aside, although not strictly useful for anything other than
what it was intended (what is?), matlab is a great
example of where loose typing can get out of
hand. just one or two extra characters here or
there, and all of a sudden the NxMxYxW matrix
represented by the letter g has undergone some
horrifying transformation of its coordinates, and
maybe is now a tensor, or has suddenly undergone a
cartesian product with someone else. or a dot product,
with its columns treated as vectors. or maybe its rows.
or maybe both!
i only mention this because i spent a summer a few
years back converting what was perhaps a few hundred
lines of matlab into C. and yes, the C was several orders
of magnitude faster at doing the actual calculations, and
no, i do not recommend repeating the exercise.
operator overloading and dynamic typing are sneaky and
clever and perhaps allow one to naturally express what
they're thinking more easily, but there is so much room for
abuse, i'm wary of them.
when code readability and maintainability are essential,
that super-fancy trick you came up with in 10 characters
may take someone several minutes to decode, decrypt,
and understand well enough to modify (or to realize that
the trick was so fancy and special-purpose that the whole
bit needs to be scrapped and rewritten otherwise).
i do miss some things from perl, however. i'll admit it.
string handling in C is like trying to remove the links of
a bracelet from a blender on full speed.
the more i think about it, the more i love whatever language
i'm using for whatever project i'm working on. some projects
would be (or are) horrifying to try to implement in some languages
[the matlab->C example springs to mind], so, since learning
new languages isn't a gigantic burden, the only relevance is
the intended application, i suppose. which is a very cumbersome
way of repeating (reinforcing?) what other people have already said.
s.
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