His opinion seems rather agreeable to, altough I'm not opposed to using other languages than C for systems programming, but I wouldn't reach for SEPPLES to do that.
He says some stupid shit at times, but this, I agree with.
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Anonymous2010-06-12 9:44
Good taste is one of the hallmarks of a great programmer. Sepples advocates are usually technically proficient but ultimately bad programmers. They like sepples because the complexity appeals to their machobullshit nature.
Notice how the language is basically described by one
rather thin book. Readably. So what C does so well is to do that whole "make it as
simple as you can, but no simpler". And that is what makes
it great. The language is powerful, yet fairly minimal. There really aren't many features you could remove
from the C language without crippling it. Sure, there's
three different looping constructs, and you could make
trivial (syntactic) changes to the language, but that's
really not the point. The language is simple, but
without being too simple.
He goes off on incendiary rants a lot, but his attitude is consistent: kernel development is for manly men. You prissy girls can go back to userland but stay the hell away from git.
Name:
Anonymous2010-06-12 19:09
What does Theo the Rat say about this?
Name:
Anonymous2010-06-12 21:19
...the best way to make things work is to not need to communicate at all. It's exactly the same issue as in parallel programming - any communication inevitably is the main bottleneck. And the best way to avoid communication is to have some "culture" - which is just another way to say "collection of rules that don't even need to be written down/spoken, since people are aware of it". Sure, we obviously have a lot of documentation about how things are supposed to be done, but exactly as with any regular human culture, documentation is kind of secondary.
THIS is why Lisp will never become a mainstream language.
One of the absolute worst features of [Lisp] is how it makes a lot of things so context-dependent - which just means that when you look at the code, a local view simply seldom gives enough context to know what is going on.
That is a huge problem for communication. It immediately makes it much harder to describe things, because you have to give a much bigger context.
"So what C does so well is to do that whole "make it as
simple as you can, but no simpler". And that is what makes
it great. The language is powerful, yet fairly minimal."
And this is why C is completely outclassed by Lisp/Scheme/Smalltalk correct?
Name:
Anonymous2010-06-13 4:48
>>19
Nope. It won't be mainstream because it doesn't have a big name actively marketing it. Just like the current mainstream languages are C# (Microsoft), Java (Oracle), Python (Google). The rest are happy to occupy a their respective niches without trying to be the BEST LANGUAGE EVAR. The runners up are: Sepples (past that stage but going strong partially due to momentum, partially due to scientific, mobile and game industry) and C (because it's everywhere).
Name:
Anonymous2010-06-13 11:14
One of the absolute worst features of [the C preprocessor] is how it makes a lot of things so context-dependent - which just means that when you look at the code, a local view simply seldom gives enough context to know what is going on.
That is a huge problem for communication. It immediately makes it much harder to describe things, because you have to give a much bigger context.
Lisp dialects still use car and cdr (pronounced /ˈkɑr/ and /ˈkʊdər/) for the operations that return the first item in a list and the rest of the list respectively.
>>25 A major problem with C and C++ is the amount of context you need to understand another programmer's code: you have to read all related header files, all related #defines, and all related typedefs before you can even begin to analyze a program. 1
>>38 A major problem with C and C++ is the amount of context you need to understand another programmer's code: you have to read all related header files, all related #defines, and all related typedefs before you can even begin to analyze a program. In essence, programming with #defines and typedefs results in every programmer inventing a new programming language that's incomprehensible to anybody other than its creator, thus defeating the goals of good programming practices.
Haha, oh wow. I can't believe I am reading that on the official Java website. What a bunch of cocksuckers they are.