Re: Fun with C

["Elias Salomão Helou Neto" <eshneto@gmail.com>]

On Apr 21, 2:36 pm, "Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mail...@dmitry-kazakov.de>
wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Apr 2011 09:19:08 -0700 (PDT), Elias Salom o Helou Neto wrote:
>
> > Ops. I think you're wrong here. Programming languages _must_ be
> > different from each other, otherwise there would not be reason for so
> > many to exist. And some new, useful, paradigms appear that can't be
> > natural to any programmer simply because it did not exist before its
> > invention!
>
> Nope. A counterexample is natural languages. There are many of them. They
> are different in some senses and same in others. Languages existed before
> poetry, novels, scripts and graffiti were invented.
> I doubt that a language (natural or formal) can be designed for new
> paradigms.
> Rather it is so that so-called "paradigms" are imprinted in our
> brains and languages just reflect the ways we are thinking.

Could you please elaborate on that? I understand (and mostly agree
with) your claim that all paradigms are imprinted in our brains, but
I'd rather still call one of them new if it is the first time it is
actually explicitly stated and used for a purpose such as designing a
programming language.

> This, I think,
> can explain popularity of such outrageously poor languages like C. C
> programmers are in majority simply because most of programmers do think as
> they write.

Yep. That's a major problem. No matter how much I try to teach people
to think before coding, they won't do so. But I don't think that Ada
makes it any better, does it? It is not a claim, since I could not do
it without knowing Ada, but rather a truly interested question.

And I fail to see why is C so "outrageously poor". My view is that
professional programmers deserve much more this epithet than C does.
Remember all those guys you've interviewed that couldn't mentally do
an XOR with 0xFF? My tendency is to say they're the ones who are
"outrageously poor".

Of course this is a rather good justification for Ada to be more
widely adopted. As I've said elsewhere on this thread, Ada's premises
are far more realistic than C's ones. But it does not make C a lame
language.

Elias.