🚀 go-pugleaf

jmartin@cs.ucla.edu (Jay Martin) wrote:
>nelsoni@rintintin.Colorado.EDU (Ian S. Nelson) writes:
>
>> Ignorant stuff about how C is not the ultimate language.
>
>Come on!  What do you think the #1 Computer Science Dept. in the US
>teaches, not Ada or Modula* but C!  This proves that C is 100X better
>than Ada!  What does the rest of Computer Science use for doing
>research?: C and Unix!  
>
>I quote brilliant Computer Scientists Ira Pohl and Al Kelly from a
>University very close to Stanford: "C is terse. C has a very powerful
>set of operators.  ... Indirection and address arithmetic can be
>combined within expressions to accomplish in one statement or
>expression what would require many statements in another language.
>...  Software productivity studies show that programmers can produce,
>on average, a small amount of working code a day.  A language that is
>terse explicitly magnifies the underlying productivity of its
>programmer.  ... is an elegant language. It places no straitjacket on
>the programmer's access to the machine.  The imperfections it has are
>easier to live with than a perfected restrictiveness.  C is appealing
>in its puzzlelike character and in its unfettered nature."
>
>So using the criteria of Computer Science we get (scale 1-10):
>
>Desirable CS Attribute                 C     Ada
>----------------------------------------------------------------
>Terseness                              10     0
>Lots of operators                      10     0
>Stuff Combined in 1 statement          10     0
>} vs "end if;"  productivity boost     10     0
>No Straitjackets whatsoever            10     0
>Puzzlelike character                   10     0 (No puzzle book even exists)
>Unfettered Nature                      10     0
>                                    ---------------
>Mean                                   10     0
>Median                                 10     0
>Standard Deviation                      0     0
>(To show you I am really scientific)
>
>
>Jay

-- 
I can agree with some of the things you have said especially if I need 
to hack out a quick and dirty program which I will never need to re-visit
and which no-one else will ever have to maintain.  However, in my work and
experience I want code that is readable, maintainable and easily upgradable.
All of the things you cited then mean grades of 0, 0 and 0 for the catagories
I have just listed.

All in All, for a large project I will stick with Ada or C++ provided I am not
stuck with a bunch of re-trained C hackers.


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