Worse is better?

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 14 October 2014 at 08:00:21 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
> large code base. I am not even speaking about algorithms in STL 
> or std.algorithm sense but much more routine things - common 
> small snippets that either get copy-pasted or hidden behind C 
> macros.

C has macros to compensate for deficiencies in the language.

What kind of routine things are you thinking about that cannot be 
covered either by better features or by explicit inlining?

> Probably when you say "low level" you imagine something like 
> embedded microcontrollers. But there quite many huge scale

I am thinking about the stuff where it makes sense to drop down 
to C/C++ due to the nature of the problem.

For most applications it makes more sense to write the high level 
stuff in a high level language such as Objective-C/Swift and drop 
down to C/C++ for engine level stuff.

People often write everything in C/C++ for portability, but that 
is really a compiler/platform issue, not a language-design issue.

> systems out there too, sometimes reaching millions lines of C 
> code. And those struggle from minimal C abstraction 
> capabilities.

Or they struggle with C not having the right feature set. Sure, 
with templates you can implement more convenient ref-counting and 
unique-pointers, and you can get a little bit more type safety. 
But C suffers from the simple design of BCPL which was a bare 
bones version of CPL.