Anselm R. Garbe wrote:Why is there no hope for writing a compiler in less than ten thousand lines? Maybe because modern compilers need to provide so much optimization features, that the complex software they have to compile don't performs poorly? No it's because modern processors require complex optimizations to obtain optimal performance. So maybe you should be complaining to computer architects. Furthermore, have you ever written a interpreter or compiler? Do you really know what kind of complexity goes into one? Have you written an operating system kernel? Like code optimization in compilers, abstractions solve the symptom of complexity, but not the complexity itself. Abstractions follow the divide et empera paradigm, which is not bad, if the interfaces are kept simple and generic, like the pipe-filter paradigm. But too often abstractions leads to more complexity, than necessary. See the Web Service desease for example. Do I need an XML parser in the future to call atoi()? I'm not advocating Web Services as a paragon of abstraction, but clearly you seem to have not been educated on the concept of irreducible or Kolmogorov complexity. Some things are just complex. Period. I doubt that I can do fewer data abstraction with C than withany other language. What can't I do with C, but with another language? And this is exactly because you are ignorant. A common problem with open source software developers. Try educating yourself; very little software should be written in C. Again, this shows an considerable lack of understanding about different models of computation. Some problems are significantly easier when provided with the correct paradigm. Furthermore, different models of computation allow for much better simpler/compilers. My guess is that you've never actually tried programming in anything except for poorly designed effectful-imperative languages.And I doubt that the SLOC metric is really language-dependend, there is not much difference in 10 thousand lines of bare Java code compared to 10 thousand lines of bare C code (maybe the C code provides more functionality, because not every global var is accessed with a useless getter and setter method...). I don't think so. Do you really believe you can understand software systems consisting of more than 10kloc? We consider adding a 'Hall of Ueberprogrammers'... So you're telling me that gcc, ghc, Linux, *BSD, etc. are complete failures? Anyway, your response was pretty much what I expected, so I'm not going to bother debating further. Most open source developers are completely clueless when it comes to choosing the right tools for the job. -- [Geoff Washburn|[EMAIL PROTECTED]|http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~geoffw/] |
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