Maybe what Russ meant is the fact that C is widely successful does not make
C a beautiful language. I would agree to this point. C was successful
because it was useful, not because it was beautiful. Although beauty is in
the eye of the beholder, is Haskell beautiful, or Lisp? I doubt it. Ruby has
a certain beauty, but it is written in C (and the implementation itself is
not beautiful at all). It is also really slow. However, the article was
interesting.
-J.
----- Original Message -----
From: Alfredo Covaleda
To: [email protected] ; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee
Group
Sent: Saturday, October 15, 2011 10:55 AM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Dennis Ritchie: The Shoulders Steve Jobs Stood
On(Wired)
You are joking. Aren't you? That's not the sense, I think that you are not
pointing to where article is doing. With fair reasons many people is making
eulogies to something that transcended. Dennis Ritchie let a legacy which is
impossible to deny. Today's software is not Fortran descendant is C
descendant. I think that's the sense. No body is telling or asking if C is
perfect. To say that programming languages had to be better this way or
that way is a good and interesting question but doesn't change current
programming languages state. If you let me say a metaphor; I am here thanks
to a some rare structure appeared 3500 millions years ago: a Prokariotic
cell that contained DNA freely flowing in the citoplams. Why nucleotides?.
Wasn't better other kind of structure. Why Adenine, why Guanine. Why
diphosphate. Will Structure and Function of ancient ADN emerged 3500
millions years ago be responsible of cancer that with high probabilities
will kill me some day? (attending to familiar history. Just an example).
They are questions that really don't matter (even if cancer actually will
kill me). Is the legacy from C to Java or C++ or PHP responsable of
problems that programmers have when are trying to code?. If today's
software were Fortran descendant, software were better?
No more than the kind of questions made for Albert Camus if were alive.
¿Why something emerged this way and not than that way?
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