Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tormeh 4068 days ago
And why would I want to understand how things work down in the OS?

Anyway, C is a horrible language. Between Fortran and Ada it's unclear to me why C should be chosen for anything, inertia and herdthink aside.

2 comments

Because it intersects with most of what you're doing. Why is that process supervisor I'm using crashing? Oh, it's still using select(2) instead of a modern I/O multiplexing mechanism, and exceeding its FD_SETSIZE limit. What do all these calls mean in my tracing output?

All the infrastructure you're using goes through C/POSIX in one way or another. When things go haywire, you can only get by fixing it on the higher levels or just blindly restarting for so long.

Have you used Fortran or Ada?
Have used Fortran. It's pretty nice, actually. I mean, it does have unstructured programming, but its structured alternatives feel pretty natural. Fortran code, like C code, feels a bit fragile but unlike C, Fortran doesn't seem to be actively malevolent. I only know Ada by its (excellent) reputation.

EDIT: Only true if you use the implicit-none flag when compiling Fortran.