Walter Bright wrote:
Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
Walter Bright wrote:
Nick Sabalausky wrote:
Doesn't matter what you're making, OS or not, the choice of language
*certainly* carries repercussions throughout a project. Sure Linux
is doing fine with C. So what? It could probably be doing a lot
better with D.
It's like if you gave the Spartan Leonidas a Henry repeating rifle -
he still would have lost at Thermopylae. But there is little doubt
that one Henry repeating rifle is worth a hundred spear-chucking
wicker-armored immortals.
Sometimes I run these crazy calculations: how much modern firepower
would be just enough to turn the odds in a classic battle? At
Thermopilae, I think two Vickers with enough ammo would have been just
about enough. Also at the Lord of the Rings 2 night castle defense,
one machine gun would have sufficed (better protection and fewer
assailants).
Andrei
You don't have to look far back to see many examples of superior
technology burying a far more powerful foe. For example, there are
several cases where a handful of stringbag airplanes sank capital
battleships.
Stirling's "Island in the Sea of Time" is about bringing modern weapons
to bronze-age battlefields.
Curiously though, the Persian composite longbow was deadlier than the
rifles used in the Napoleonic wars, so you really have to go up to WWI
before you have a clearly superior technology in terms of raw power. The
fundamental disadvantage being that it was so difficult to become a
proficient longbowman, whereas you can train someone to be dangerous
with a rifle in a few weeks.
(Kind of like asm vs VB, I reckon).
