Author: Russell Reagan
Date: 10:39:16 08/12/04
Go up one level in this thread
On August 11, 2004 at 18:38:38, Anthony Cozzie wrote: >It appears that I need to expound a little bit on the idiocy of C++, and why it >is the _worst_ language ever to walk the face of this planet, except for >possibly Java and COBOL, and why people who go on and on about iterators and >templates make me want to throw up. > >In the beginning, there was Assembler. People were very annoyed that code they >wrote on one machine could not compile on another. Thus C was borne. C is >basically portable assembler. You have pointers and typecasts, and that lets >you do whatever you want. With a modern compiler, C is just as fast as >assembler, slightly more maintainable, and very portable. Unfortunately, it is >also very easy to shoot yourself in the foot with C, and doing anything is a lot >of work due to all the memory management the programmer has to do, etc. > >Thus, people desired "High Level Languages", in which abstract mathematical >descriptions could be written. My personal favorite is ML, but Haskell and Lisp >are also good. The advantage here is that all code is very neat and simple, >because the programmer is freed from worry about the little details. The >problem is that all high level languages are _slow_, from 50% (OCAML) up to 10X >(Java) slower than C. > >Then, we have C++, which tries to make a high level language out of a low level >language. Guess what? it _doesn't work_. It is an exercise in stupidity. >There are two ways to write C++: you can write it as C with a few nice syntax >features to clean up your code, or you can (as you are evidently advocating) >write it as an attempted high level language. The only problem with this is that >you will fail miserably, because you still have to do your own memory >management, etc. So you end up with the same development time as C and the same >speed as a high level language. > >This is why languages like C++ and Java are the anus of the body of programming >languages. If you want to sacrifice speed and write in Lisp, I may not agree >with you, but I can at least see where you are coming from. If you want to >write in HLA-attempt-C++, I can only consider you a moron. > >anthony Spoken like a true CS student.
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