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From: Pancho <Pancho.Jones@proton.me>
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Subject: Re: TeX and Pascal [was Re: The joy of FORTRAN]
Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2024 10:19:08 +0100
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On 9/29/24 07:50, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
> On 29/09/2024 06:44, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:
> The only ones I came to HATE
>>    were LISP/PROLOG and ADA - the latter being SO fascist
>>    that, well, no WONDER govt projects take 20 years ....
> Well yes, that what happens when you let computer scientists take over.
> 
> I knew someone who ran a small company doing low level programming fir 
> their custome hardware.
> One day one of the coders said 'lets do the next one in C++'
> So they did, and a year later realised that before you wrote C++ you 
> have to sit down and write some or of spec to show what objects you are 
> going to need to create etc etc.

I think of OO more as a design philosophy than a language feature. The 
early problem I saw with C++ was projects that implemented classes 
bottom up. If you saw they had written their own string class, you 
immediately knew the project was going to fail.

The basic idea behind this is that initially you need to have a good 
overall picture of what your application is going to do. You need to be 
able to split a project into separate parts, separate components. This 
effectively mapped to designing classes top down.

The failing projects would get programmers learning a new language 
trying to develop utility classes to make their life "easy". They would 
spend all their time doing this and hence the project would fail. It 
would also be difficult to on board new programmers, due to all the 
badly designed utility classes they needed to learn.

Of its self I thought C++ was a brilliant language, for its time.

> In the same way I always write down a crude 'data dictionary' whenever I 
> am implementing any sort of file based data system. And especially an 
> SQL based one
> 
> But they didn't. They tried to hack it and it was a disaster.
> I hate OO.
> 
> It is a compsci invention that doesn't map well onto an actually CPU 
> which is a procedural beast.
> 

It maps fine. Most optimisation is about efficient algorithms, not about 
shaving micro-seconds off a loop in a crap or naive algorithm.

Without high level concepts such as objects, it is very hard to 
implement more abstract, but more efficient algorithms. Caveat, I'm 
relatively bad with complexity. I'm very good with simplicity, but bad 
with complexity, I have sometimes wondered if there are different types 
of intelligence. I have worked with Cambridge types who claimed to be 
good with complexity.

> 
> Most of its vaunted advantages can be attained by writing C in a 
> structured way and others like operator overloading are just damned 
> confusing.
>

Yes, I could implement OO designs in C, and I would if I had to, but I 
would be borrowing what I learnt from C++ and other OO languages.

> I don't WANT to use the same syntax to add two strings together as to 
> add two numbers.
> 

Syntactic sugar can be nice, as long as it doesn't obscure what is 
really going on. Mainly I don't like it because it makes unfamiliar 
languages harder to understand.


> I found that out in JavaScript where a comparison between a string  "1" 
> and a number 1 failed on IE but worked on Firefox.
> 
> I had found an 'undefined' gap in the language.
> 
> In C you are absolutely aware at all times what type of object you are 
> dealing with and if you move to another one it's via an explicit cast. 
> Or if implicit, you normally get a compiler warning.
> 

Oh, I can be unaware of what my code is really doing, in any language :-)

> In C if you want to deallocate RAM you say so. It doesn't silently 
> collect garbage under your feet and take a millisecond to do it
>

And you can deallocate RAM many times, or not at all. I have a friend 
interested in music and he won't touch garbage collection, but I rarely 
cared about non deterministic short pauses. The benefits of not doing 
all the janitor stuff with memory was huge.

I think even non garbage collection modern languages try to automate 
memory allocation and deallocation, ref counting, out of scope 
destructors etc. Being happy with garbage collection I never looked at 
it, but the ideas date back to (at least) the mid 1990s C++, Scott 
Meyers etc.

> Javascript silently just does what it *thinks* you meant. And gets it 
> wrong.
> 
> In short there is a layer of uncertainty built into modern languages 
> that attempt to map abstract compsci concepts into actual procedural code.
> 
> Which is why C is probably still the most popular  language.
>

Only with old codgers.

> 
>