On Wed, 9 Sep 2015 11:09 am, Mario Figueiredo wrote: > You know, it is a pointless exercise to try and downplay programming > languages (any programming language) that has proven its worth by being > generally adopted by the programming community. Adoption is the sign of > a respected and well designed language.
Counter-examples: PHP and C. Adoption of programming languages is driven by many things, technical excellence and careful design are not even in the top 10. Most of them are social in nature, particularly "what is everyone else using?". Network effects dominate: you could design the perfect language, but if nobody else uses it, nobody will use it. Sometimes a language will actually gain a kind of technical excellence despite some really shitty design decisions -- but usually at great cost elsewhere. C is a good example of that. Due to lousy decisions made by the designers of C, it is a language really well suited for writing fast, incorrect code. Since programmers benefit from writing fast code, but rarely suffer from writing incorrect code (it's mostly users who suffer the consequences of security holes), we have ended up in the situation we live in now, where compilers compete to write faster and faster code that has less and less relation to what the programmer intended. (I wanted to link to the "Everything Is Broken" essay on The Medium, but the page appears to be gone. This makes me sad. BTW, what's the point of Google's cache when it just redirects to the original, missing, page?) In fairness to the C creators, I'm sure that nobody back in the early seventies imagined that malware and security vulnerabilities would be as widespread as they have become. But still, the fundamental decisions made by C are lousy. Assignment is an expression? Lack of first-class arrays? The C pre-processor? They're pretty awful, but *nothing* in the entire history of computing, not even Intercal and the COMEFROM command, comes even close to the evil that is C "undefined behaviour". I believe that the computing industry may never recover from the harm done to it by the widespread use of C. -- Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
