A story about Python... sort of

Paul Boddie paul at boddie.net
Fri Jul 4 06:14:09 EDT 2003


"Max Khesin" <max at cNOvSisiPonAtecMh.com> wrote in message news:<dGZMa.5172$351.1725266 at twister.nyc.rr.com>...
>
> I am not sure where we disagree. This is exactly my point. The statement
> "
> Engineering Lessons
> -------------------
>     1. C/C++ is no longer a viable development language
> "
> is pure rubbish. C++ is still great for certain kinds of projects, and there
> are lots of open-source and proprietary projects to prove this.

I wouldn't agree with you unreservedly here. In many respects, the
choice of C++ for projects is often an educational problem with the
developers - people choose it because it's what they know, potentially
not very well in many cases. So one could say that it's really
something they just know something about - it seems like the
right/safe choice, presumably because their peers/acquaintances who
are just as badly informed tell them so.

Those of us who are used to more high-level languages would think
twice about writing a large application using a language/library
combination without decent (ie. modern) support for memory management,
for example. I can imagine that many developers find it challenging
and even rewarding to think up interesting schemes for allocating and
freeing memory - perhaps they even think that this (and lots of other
unnecessary wheel reinvention) is what programming is all about.
Personally, I'd rather get on with implementing the actual system
concerned.

So, I'd rephrase the original statement: C/C++ are frequently
suboptimal choices for application development. Why? Poor support for
near-essential features found in contemporary languages combined with
the absence of timely, effective standardisation of useful library
functionality.

Paul




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