I have learnt C second language 26 years ago and have constantly used it since despite this I am currently instituting a NO C policy at work. Most (all) of our code does not need the performance of C and generally the code is not optimal anyway and leaving the decisions to an optimised scripting language is quite probably going to run faster than poor C code written in a hurry.
If we work on numbers. My code generally runs on a 2% error rate (all right I am making 2% up but the number is not important...). I rewrote an application of 2,300 lines of C code (not a comment in sight) into 230 lines of perl code (with lots of comments). Now with my 2% error rate I had 5 errors in my code (about right). Now the 2,300 lines would have had 50 errors given the same error rate. Don't use C because you will create more code, more code equals more bugs. The moral is use the correct language for the job. Performance is just a few thousand dollars in hardware away. Take $40K as your base (for example) and a server of $5K you need to save about 7 weeks work to pay for it. It is not a lot of time with 10 times the number of errors in your code. Bugs cost the time in development, correcting bugs in production code is far far worse. Sounds like a talk coming one here... Ken Foskey -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
