On Tuesday, 14 November 2017 at 16:38:58 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grostad
wrote:
It [C]is flawed... ESR got that right, not sure how anyone can
disagree.
Well I 'can' disagree ;-)
Is a scalpel flawed because someone tried to use it to screw in a
screw?
Languages are just part of an evolutionary chain.
No part of the chain should be considered flawed - unless it was
actually flawed - in that it didn't meet the demands of the
environment in which it was initially conceived. In that
circumstance, it must be considered flawed, and evolutionary
forces will quickly take care of that.
But a programming language is not flawed, simply because people
use it an environment where it was not designed to operate.
If I take the average joe blow out of his comfy house, and put
him in the middle of raging battle field, is Joe Blow flawed,
because he quickly got shot down? What's flawed there, is the
decision to take Joe Blow and put him in the battlefield.
Corporate needs/strategy, skews ones view of the larger
environment, and infects language design. I think it's infected
Go, from the get Go. I am glad D is not being designed by a
corporate, otherwise D would be something very different, and far
less interesting.
The idea that C is flawed, also skews ones view of the larger
environment, and so it too infects language design. This is where
Eric got it wrong, in my opinion. He's looking for the language
that can best fix the flaws of C.
In fact C has barely had to evolve (which is not a sign of
something that is flawed), because it works just fine, in
enviroments for which it was designed to work in. And those
enviroments still exist today. They will still exist
tomorrow..and the next day...and the next..and...
So language designers..please stop the senseless bashing of C.
Why does anyone need array index validation anyway? I don't get
it. If you're indexing incorrectly into an array..you're a fool.
btw. The conditions under which C evolved, are well documented
here. It's a facinating read.
https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.pdf
