Looking back: “The future belongs to C”
I was flipping through back issues of IEEE Computer in CS and found this letter to the editor.
There are many areas where modern languages (such as perl and python) strike a good balance between programmer effort and CPU time. It seems to me that, excepting those areas, this quote is still largely true.
I would, however, be careful of choosing C on the basis of performance alone as doing so could be premature optimization.
To the Editor:
Ted Lewis' reply to Kenneth Pronovici(“A role for language ‘relics’,” Sept. 1996, p 10) was insulting and shallow. The Cobol and Fortran analogies were totally off the mark. Cobol was not intended to live forever. Fortran, recognized as having weaknesses, was rapidly restandardized several times. Yesteryear's high-level languages were intended as experiments to show that efficient machine code could be generated from a procedural algebraic problem representation in a limited RAM environment.
Lewis' “suggested avenues” such as NewtonScript and JFactory are useful only for writing research papers. They remind me of Occam and Linda. Java and Visual Basic are not great leaps forward, but by-products of the popularization of the computer, suitable for shipping apps quickly to Joe Sixpack.
Tools that solve general problems efficiently live forever. We still computer with transistorized binary logic circuits, and we will be doing so 20 years hence. Consequently, backend software will be written in C 20 years hence because C can efficiently map a general class of procedural algebraic problems onto transistorized binary logic circuits.
Lewis should bear in mind that yesterday's solutions were important steps forward, not fodder for cheap shots fired years later.
Bruce David Wilner
Network Security Laboratories
Bethesda, Me.
wilner@dockmaster.ncsc.mil.
It has been a while since I last voluntarily spent excess time at Concordia. I headed over around noon for a SGA committee meeting. I don't remember how I got myself involved. Anyway, we are rewriting the student government constitution. (Normally I could not care less about student government, but this way I have a chance to stick it to Res Life.) Besides, the meeting is held in the library, and I can get real work done in the library.
After the meeting, I found a table in the library and started working. I read a couple of books on Machine Learning, one on Ausperger's Syndrome, one on Digital Video compression, one on Jesuit education, and part of Watership Downs.
Sometime during the book reading, I started listening to the CDs from the library's music collection. Eventually I came to Bach's Goldberg Variations. The Variations seem to have a calming, ordering effect on my mind.
I managed to write a trivial bit of python that pulls some data from a SGML file and stuffs it into a BSD Database. It is a lot easier to work with the data when it is all in one consistent place.
Shortly after that, this person nearby started talking on her cell phone. Atmosphere disrupted, I gathered my things and wandered over to the CS area.
I found Andy in CS playing Morrowind. He was hungry and the cafeteria had just closed, so we wandered over to the big lounge. Andy grabbed a burrito for him and a pop-tart for me. We wandered back to CS so Andy could heat his burrito in the microwave in Rob's office. Rob was playing Halo. I read random old papers on the bookshelf while Andy watched Rob's game. Eventually Rob had to leave to go meet Michelle. Andy and I wandered down for my once a semester visit to The Haven.