[Freeciv-Dev] Re: curiosity

[Vasco Alexandre Da Silva Costa <vasc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 1 Dec 2001, Raimar Falke wrote:

> On Sat, Dec 01, 2001 at 04:20:43PM +0100, Gregor Zeitlinger wrote:
> > On Sat, 1 Dec 2001, Alan Schmitt wrote:
> > just very appealing. Objective Caml was one of them, and one that was
> > ranked 2nd on a speed test after gcc and faster than g++.
> 
> Do you mean http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/?

Take this benchmark with a huge pile of salt. I've made some comments to
the tester and he seems to be a pretty nice guy, but i question the
interest of some of those benchmarks.

> > He'll get used to it, and feel comfortable with it (regardles
> > whether it's good) and use that one or languages with a similar
> > paradigm.
> 
> I have to agree. I learned the basic ones (pascal, c, perl, java and
> c++) and made only short trips to prolog and haskell. Than I found
> python and sticked with it. It is understandable and you can write

I've programmed in basic, logo, pascal, modula-2, c, x86 asm, smalltalk,
c++, lisp, prolog and caml.

I've glanced at Tcl/Tk, Objective C, Java and Ada

Of these i only programmed meaningful programs in c, c++ and lisp.

The problem of using a language != c is that you always come to a time you
need to interface to some OS routine and you find out either you can't, or
that its a fscking pain to do it. Not to mention the fact that your
program is now coded in more than one language.

I have the following comments to make:

basic:          no functions or procedures, game over. GOSUB? no thanks.
logo:           need i say anything? good for teaching programming and nothing
                else.
pascal:         too strict, you end up typing way too much. for loops are much
                less flexible. i find it too contraining and limited.
modula-2:       nicer than pascal, but still has most of its problems.
c:              fast, flexible, easy to shoot your foot with, really hard
                to debug, has virtually universal support.
x86 asm:        not portable.
smalltalk:      its dead what can i say?
c++:            nearly as fast as c, flexible, horribly complex syntax,
                unreadable code, mixes implementation with interfaces, you
                can easily interface to c, STL sucks, needs a bigger API,
                inheritance and templates are nice, as hard to debug as c.
lisp:           several built-in data types, flexible, code is more
                unreadable because of prefixed notation, code is more
                elegant because of prefixed notation, slow, crap compilers,
                crap garbage collection, lousy interface to c, has OO
                support.
prolog:         i doubt this can be a general purpose language.
caml:           obfuscated function declaration syntax.


These i don't have experience with but here are my feelings anyway:

tcl/tk:         slow.
objective-c:    nice, but how many people use it? and it doesn't have
                templates which is a shame.
java:           slow, many features, too big (duplicated) API, constantly
                mutating API, doesn't really offer anything new besides
                portability, can't use pointers, nice support for things
                like serializing/deserializing objects and net
                programming support.
ada:            yet another pascal derived product. also suffers from
                being way too strict.


All of these languages have a purpose. They are all tools to enable you to
reach an end. Some are better for some things, some for others. Yes, even
BASIC has a purpose :-)

I notice all the new alleged "C-killers" have a similar syntax to C. I
guess C did do something right after all.

---
Vasco Alexandre da Silva Costa @ Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisboa