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Old 10-16-2009, 08:15 AM
sam_midkiff sam_midkiff is offline
Reptilian Rocketeer
 
Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 60
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mycrofte
The "C" languages should have been outlawed from college classes before they even started. It is one of the most convoluted pieces of crap I have ever seen. And it compiles 10 times bigger files than any language I've ever used.

I wouldn't doubt that is half the problem with newer versions of Windows. Never occurred to Microsoft (when trying to create a new OS) to go back to assembly code...


I apologize for the thread drift, and unless I encounter a moment of weakness this will be my last post on the subject. Time is better spent building rockets than talking about programming languages.

C on a decent operating system has its place. As an instructional language, it offers the advantage and disadvantage of making students understand memory, addresses and pointers. As with everything real, there are trade-offs, and different compilers, linkers and OSes make different trade-offs and fill different needs.

C was developed to implement Unix. In "The Mythical Man Month", Fred Brooks explains how OS/360, at around 6 million lines of assembly code, almost killed IBM. I started at IBM Research in the fall of 1991 after their first "one-time" billion plus charge. Sometime during the next two years as IBM flirted with bankruptcy, Fran Allen (who was my second line manager) explained to me that things had been much worse during the OS/360 days. In contrast, XP had 45 million plus lines of code, and while it was late, no one talked about Microsoft going under. In my opinion, the difference between the two was the use of modern languages (largely C and C++) and development tools that enabled a more distributed development model.

Sam
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