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by weberc2
2357 days ago
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I'm not missing anything, I'm responding to a specific claim--that libraries allow C to compensate for missing language features. This is patently false irrespective of the merits of the features in question. That said, I think your entire criteria for determining whether a language or feature is good boils down to its intuitiveness to experienced C programmers, which seems like a particularly poor, subjective criteria and it probably doesn't actually even hold for C considering all of the security issues and undefined behaviors that are introduced by and continue to surprise experienced C programmers. For my money, closures, pattern matching, and templates (not any implementation in particular) are easy enough to reason about and much better than the corresponding bugs they address, but to each his own. |
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I see this tired argument over and over. It is especially thrown out when some esoteric language syntax is criticized.
In this case it seems to miss the authors point entirely. My understanding of his argument is that the C language maps reasonably well to machine code. Adding new features to the language could hamper that intuitive mapping between the language syntax and the actual machine code generated.
A valid criticism (which others have made) is that the actual mapping between C code and machine code on modern machines is far less intuitive than one might expect. Another valid response would be a demonstration that "closures, pattern matching, and templates" can be intuitively mapped directly to machine code.
I would be happy if I never see the "you are too blinded by your own language to understand" argument ever again. It borders on ad-hominem and extends no benefit of doubt to the original author.