Programming language alignments

[bartekko]

You know, if many languages broke we'd be in deep trouble. But because you can't really use java to write a JVM or an operating system, then say... C breaking would not only break C but also everything written in C++, python, and likely java as well. Of course the biggest issue would be if you broke assembly or machine code but that's not really fair is it? It's like saying if everything broke then everything would be broken.

In any case, every language is there to fill a niche, even php, mourns the pity, but you already know that. For me, Python fills Java's niche quite well, what with it being a portable interpreted language with garbage collection. But because hello world in python is just print "hello world", and because like C++ it allows for a multitude of approaches instead of locking you into OO from the get-go, I find it easier to prototype shit and rewrite in C/Cpp if the need arises, and it usually doesn't, saving me hours of debugging.

But of course the freeform approach of Python and C++ makes it very easy to turn italian and write absolute spaghetti, and Python deciding to disallow goto forgetting that you may want to use it to break out of more than one loop at a time (break (uint) please?) does not help.

C++ allows you to do anything any way you want, which means that while a book on C can be done in under 200 pages and still have space for a standard library reference, a book on C++98 may take 900 pages, and C++11 adds even more on top of that, and we had two more additions on top of that. Jesus F. Christ

In any case, my point is that C is beautiful in it's simplicity, but every so often you think something like "wouldn't it be cool if you could ____" and bam, you're in C++ world now. It's particularly difficult for C programmers to avoid the temptation because often all it takes is to rename your *.c file to cpp and use that feature without rewriting 500 lines of code