On Wed, Aug 27, 2003 at 01:11:08AM -0500, Alex Malinovich wrote: > The recent COBOL discussion has gotten me to thinking. Some languages > seem to be very popular in some situations. C is easily the dominant > language for most things Linux. So therein lies the question. Why, > exactly, is C so popular? Especially in comparison to C++. I can't think > of a single reason to use C instead of C++ for most of the coding that I > would do. I generally only write user applications. I don't get anywhere > near the kernel which is where I'd imagine most of the reason for using > C comes in. Yet I see people writing 'modern' GUI applications and using > C when I would think C++ would be a much better choice. Is there > something that I'm missing? Something that C actually does better than > C++ in regards to higher-level functions?
First convince me that object oriented programming results in maintainable and debuggable code, then convince me that C++ is a good implementation of OO, and then I might consider C++ instead of C. (I know not all the features of C++ are related to OO, but OO seems to be the main selling point of C++ vs C) > (Note that I tend to gravitate towards higher level languages by nature. > I use Perl religiously, and I love Java. If not for some of the speed > limitations and, more importantly, the fact that it's non-free, I would > say that Java is the perfect language. Hmm... is that gasoline I smell? > :) Have you ever looked at an operator precedence table for Java ? One line says : "+, -, +" (the last + is for string concatenation). Add to this the principle of strong typing and giving compilation erros whenever you omit an explicit cast, except of course if the first variable might be a string and strings are so cool so we convert everything else to a string... Whoever thought that was a good idea should be shot. Java makes strings expensive and easy to use at the same time, and that is not a good idea. And it is OO ;-) Frank > > -- > Alex Malinovich > Support Free Software, delete your Windows partition TODAY! > Encrypted mail preferred. You can get my public key from any of the > pgp.net keyservers. Key ID: A6D24837 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
