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From: aperez@cvbnet.UUCP (Arturo Perez x6739)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Was Einstein wrong after all? (was: Re: ambiguous ?)
Message-ID: <150@cvbnet.Prime.COM>
Date: 26 Oct 89 16:52:10 GMT
References: <14116@lanl.gov>
Sender: postnews@cvbnet.Prime.COM
Lines: 89

From article <14116@lanl.gov>, by jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles):
> From article <2104@se-sd.NCR.COM>, by rns@se-sd.NCR.COM (Rick Schubert):
>> [...]
>> It comes to no surprise to me, and probably not to most of the readers of
>> this newsgroup, that this is your attitude about C.  I have a very serious
>> question for you:  What is your purpose in participating in this newsgroup?
> 
> C is widely hyped as the "wave of the future" or as the only "serious"
> programming language of the 80's.  I have seen books and popular magazines
> that carry this hype to absurd lengths.  A balanced presentation of the
> _real_ merits of the language is almost impossible to find.
> 

I have several reactions to the above.  Who wrote those books?  And who
wrote those magazine articles?  I'm sure that hype comes from fact that
C is a very popular language.  But a lot of magazine writers aren't really
qualified to talk about anything, let alone something as complicated as
the utility of certain programming languages.

Let me offer a mild rebuke.  This discussion is getting quite tiresome as
it is obvious that you don't like C.  And that's fine by me; feel free
to be the loyal opposition.  But your style is one that leads to lots
of misinterpretation because your responses seem, at least to me, to be
vague and non-specific.  If you could perhaps limit yourself to me concrete
examples of the things that offend you maybe we could raise the level of
this discussion.  Also, since the 80's are over let's start talking about
the language of the 90's :-). (Whatever that may be...)

> This newsgroup provides a unique forum for the discussion of the language.
> It is read by novices and experts alike.  It is also read by non-computing
> professionals who may have control of the policy of their computing but
> without specific programming knowledge themselves.  For the novices as
> well as the non-computing types, it is useful to have a dissenting view
> at least.

Sounds like, although your above statement is ambiguous, that your talking
about management.   Are they really any managers reading this out there? Not
in any of the 3 companies I ever worked in.

If you mean other, non-programmer professionals then why should they care
about what we think about C?  They're not writing programs (as they have no
programming language) and most decisions about how software is developed tends
to revolve about the issues other than semantic purity of a language, such
as design tools, maintainability and so forth.  I must admit, C is rather 
lacking in a lot of the more attractive tools for such things (I've never
been lacking enough to see any).


Also, this forum isn't a sterling source of information.  As you say, all
kinds participate.  It takes MONTHs to figure out which of the participants
offer good advice and which don't.  I wouldn't use the information from 
these newsgroups to base any kind of purchasing or policy decision.

> 
> The truth is, all computing professionals should be concerned with
> the subject of language design - the language is the _only_ tool
> of our trade.  The real "wave of the future" hasn't been invented
> yet, but we should all be concerned about it.  Computer professionals
> should be discussing how best to integrate developments in OOP,
> symbolic processing, and functional styles without sacrificing
> the merits of conventional procedural languages. Continued disinformation
> about the supposed value of C only detracts people from this issue.

I disagree.  Sure, language design is important.  But not to EVERYONE.  If
that we the case, we'ld all still be working for the government calculating
firing tables.  Most software professionals only care about deadlines
and how to make the application more palatable to the user.  If it takes
assembler to get the job done, then so be it.  Language design doesn't
consume my working day very often.

> 
> Is it really desireable that genuinely bright people spend considerable
> time discussing "the sizeof(struct)" or "(0) vs. NIL" (issues which
> wouldn't exist in a well designed language to begin with)?  Or is it
> better to dissuade as many as possible from pusuing this 18 year old
> dead-end of a programming language?

Remember, novices AND experts participate.  Someone has to sure the novices
know how to do it in C, IF that's what they want to do.  I kind of like the fact
that the experts (you know who you are) never get tired of answering the
same questions, year after year.  Thanx, guys. (As an aside, perhaps we should
keep a list of commonly asked questions and post it once a month :-)


Now, can we please move on to comparing C to smalltalk? :-)

Arturo Perez
ComputerVision Business Unit
A Division of Prime