Hi,
Warning: this has little to do with amber development.
On Sun, 27 Aug 2006, Xuebin Qiao wrote:
> > ... there have been two really clean,
> > > consistent models of programming so far:
> > > the C model and the Lisp model.
> > > These two seem points of high ground,
> > > with swampy lowlands between them.
> > > --Paul Graham
> >
> > I would like to know the context of this quote.
> > As it stands I disagree with this quote in many ways.
>
> Would u show some points of your disagreement, so I can explain to u based
> on my experiences.
What is the quotes context ?
On its surface this quote is laughable; with the citation I might be able
to quickly pigeon hole it (I suspect that it is an attempt to defend C
against its many detractors and no doubt Lisp is his pet project).
Any C programmer knows of C's woes, and there have been many scholarly
criticisms of C; see any programming language textbook by Ben-Ari, Tucker,
etc; eg: Sethi, Ravi. Programming Languages: Concepts and Constructs.
These include C's unclean operator based declaration syntax, dense
cryptic and overabundant operators, and pointer, array and memory issues.
While I agree with most of the criticisms, a larger point is that C
defintely grows on one. This is probably why there has been only one
really successful C competitor, namely C++. C++ is a language that supports
many programming models; because of that and its C ancestry, C++ is dirty
and extremely usable. Any serious programmer that does not recognize the
STL as Mt Everest or higher either hasnt tried it or is a big marsh-gas :)
Scott
Received on Wed Oct 04 2006 - 06:07:23 PDT
