Worse is better?

[Paulo Pinto via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 14 October 2014 at 09:36:34 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> 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.

Why drop down to C/C++?

It would be like saying you need to drop down to them from D.

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

This is what made me move away from Turbo Pascal back in the day.

If UNIX variants had a Turbo Pascal 7 or Modula-2 compatible 
compilers,
I would have stayed in that world for a lot longer.

>
>> 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.


C suffers from its designers not wanting to acknowledge what 
other systems programmers were doing, not from BCPL design.

--
Paulo