On 19 May 2012, at 21:38, Aristotle Pagaltzis wrote:
* Michael G Schwern <schw...@pobox.com> [2012-05-19 18:50]:
Or still using it, basically unchanged, as our primary system
programming language in 2012.
Indeed: why oh why… One has to wonder.
Just to play the devil sitting on the devil's advocates shoulder, could i
suggest that while C is low level, it reflects hardware accurately. And there
hasn't been a better alternative for a system programming language.
Lisp machines[1] didn't exactly take off. C++/STL didn't have anyone build upon
it for other languages significantly (i'm sure i'm about to be proven wrong
here) , just for sheer mischief i'll mention Topaz[2].
So we now live in a world of x86 hardware, in big computing clouds, that are a
mixture of hard working sysadmins finally thinking like engineers (flameproof
suit on) and marketing people making me want to get a TARDIS so I can go back
and suggest to Dante a new level of hell.
Application as a service seems a good way forward for the cloud, but when it
comes to languages, i'd personally stick an Erlang hacker, an MPI hacker and
BPEL hacker (for loose definitions of hacker, it is BPEL) in a room and see
what crack they come up with. And at some level down the chain it will still be
implemented in C.
G.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine
[2] http://www.perl.com/pub/1999/09/topaz.html
