Re: Languages don't matter. A mathematical refutation

[Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>]

"Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> writes:
>> GC is not like matrix operations.  It's not a library that you call.  It
>> pervades the operation of your entire program.
> So is the floating-point unit on x86. You must save registers and restore
> them when doing some unrelated operations. Does it make floating-point
> multiplication high-level?

That's different, the FPU save/compute/restore is completely localized
as long as you have a small amount of private memory to save the
registers.  You can call a floating point routine that saves the
registers, computes stuff, restores, and returns, and it doesn't have to
care what the rest of the program does or vice versa.

GC is different, it affects every part of the program that uses memory,
which is to say every part of the program.  Having precise GC requires
enforcing invariants across all of memory, and the absence of language
features (except maybe some special purpose unsafe fragment) that can
break those invariants.  All the code generated by the compiler has to
take the GC's requirements into account.  That's what I mean by
pervasive.

> GC does not make C# high level, though C# is. It only makes it bad
> language, because GC is a bad idea.

Heh.  There was a big increase in software development productivity in
the early 2000's, credited variously to the spread of OOP, static type
systems, agile development methodology, the conciseness of scripting
languages, and all sorts of other things.  But there's another view that
claims the real hero wasn't any of those things, it was GC.