[Freeciv-Dev] Re: curiosity

[Raimar Falke <hawk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Dec 02, 2001 at 12:32:24AM +0000, Vasco Alexandre Da Silva Costa wrote:
> 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.

Harder.

> 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

it is ok if you don't follow each version

> , doesn't really offer anything new besides
>               portability, 

> can't use pointers

I was also very critical about this at the start but it proved to be a
non-problem.

> , 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.

python:         nice built-in data types (list, mappings, complex numbers), 
                a lot of modules are provided with the standard installation 
                  (comparable to JDK 1.2 + also with GUI + RE ;) ), 
                interface to the OS (you can do mmap as well as an chmod),
                OO,
                a mechanism like serializing/deserializing objects called 
pickle,
                it is slower than java,
                it is typeless,
                code is readable for average C programmer IMHO,
                people say it can be easily interfaced with C (never tested 
this)

> 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 :-)

It was my first.

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

        Raimar
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