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An Interview with Brian Kernighan
Mihai Budiu wrote to us with an interview done with Brian Kernighan, one of the High Creator's of C. Good reading and good perspective on C.
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>Mihai Budiu wrote to us with an interview
>done with Brian Kernighan, one of the High
>Creator's of C
Brian Kernighan is not a "high creator" of C. All he did was write the book with DMR. Here's an exact quote from the interview, which you obviously did not read:
I can't comment on the ``worse'', but remember, C is entirely the work of Dennis Ritchie
GenChalupa
Bob's Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots
I'd hardly call him a high creator. The man is 5' 6", tops. That's hardly tall. I'd say I could take him (I mean this in a non-homosexual way). Why is slashdot even mentioning his height? This is hardly 'News for Nerds' now is it? Now ESR, he's a tall man. Not to mention RMS. FDR wasn't that tall I believe, sat down a lot anyhow. Lincoln, well of course he was tall, what with that hat. I don't think he was involved in the development of C.
It was a real good article. I think more of the newer users of Linux should read a little more about people like this and a few other more important "personalities" of the Unix and programming and networking worlds. It will give you a much higher appreciation of the roots of Unix and therefore Linux also.
"If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people in the world?"
No, you're mistaken. I think C is much, much more powerful than C++. Not to mention easy to use. I mean, have you even looked at operator overloading in C++?! Whoever developed that was having a laugh... who the hell would ever remember that?
Who *wouldn't* be delighted to be one of the creators of C++?
C++ sucks, but I love bearded guys!
Well, I think C scores impressively highly considering its age, but :-
surely scheme beats it! It's far more expressive, and gives pretty
good resource predictability, due to its simple execution model,
uniform syntax and treatment of data. And, if I had just one compiler
on a desert island, I can't think I'd choose one without garbage
collection
Hemos, damnit. Reading the actual story is more important to your web site than reading about bestiality for jerk off material.
If you can't make up more than two lines about the interview, then it's obviously not worthy to be featured on Slashdot.
That's my opinion. Flame me!
Thank God for the perpetuation of the use of an apostrophe as warning of upcoming pluralization's.
I was interested to see Kernighan say, When I write code on Windows I use typically the Microsoft development environment: they know where all the files are, and how to get all the include files and the like, and I use them, even though in many respects they don't match the way I want do business."
See, you're allowed to use them! It's OK!
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That's my opinion. Flame me!
Ahem... Please consider yourself flamed... Don't really want to do this, but since you asked, I'll oblige.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
In the interview it says that Kernighan is currently hacking eqn to output XML/HTML (presumably MathML?). This has been suggested as a CS thesis title at my university, fortunately I decided that it was far too sick a task to even think about.
eqn is kinda cool (given that it works wonderfully on pipelines with troff in cunning ways). But, surely by now all old eqn documents have been converted to TeX or MathML anyway? Does anyone outside of Bell Labs actually have any eqn documents?
Oh, please. C++ is (basically) a superset of C. You can do anything you can do in C in C++, and you can take advantage of *some* CC features (e.g., references, function templates, etc) even without having to use classes and OOP. Stop spreading your FUD.
Hence there is still a need for C if you need portability across platforms and compilers. C++ doesn't offer cross-compiler portability on a meaningful scale just yet.
Warning: I am a C++ hacker, and I like it a hell of a lot.
Answer: People are using C++. Every single program in The C Programming Language is a perfectly good and valid C++ program; in fact, Bjarne Stroustrup himself recommends reading The C Programming Language as a way to improve one's C++ skills.
The advantage of C++ is that it's a hell of a toolbox. You've got hammers, screwdrivers, chisels and even a fully-functioning wood lathe (watch me turn this chunk of hoary code into a table leg!). Good programmers use the right tool for the job.
And if the right tool for the job happens to be procedural programming, C (or procedural C++) is an entirely reasonable thing to do.
Scheme is a dialect of Lisp, which dates back to the time of FORTRAN and COBOL. It's hardly new. (I happen to prefer Common Lisp myself)
In many ways, Pascal was a better language, but Pascal had some inane limitations that stemmed from Wirth's academic orientation. Even Knuth criticized such things as Wirth's flat refusal to allow a "default" on case statements. "This is mindless pedantism up with which I will not put", Knuth wrote. Pascal also originally came with a lame I/O system designed for the CDC 6600 (a '60s supercomputer), no separate compilation, and no compile-time arithmetic, so you couldn't write "var tab[0..lim-1]" when "lim" was a constant. Unfortunately, that painful version became an ISO standard, leading a generation of programmers to beat their heads against the walls of the language.
This left an opening for C, which came with a system programmer oriented I/O library and, in time, a whole OS with free source code. Still, for much of the 1970s and through the mid-80s, serious researchers used Pascal. The Apple Lisa and the MacOS, for example, were in a dialect of Pascal, as were most early Mac applications. (The Lisa even had an object-oriented variant of Pascal by 1983.)
What killed Pascal, I think, is that Berkeley UNIX came with a truly lame Pascal implementation. Its horribly inefficient subscript checking implementation (a subroutine call for every subscript check) and miserable generated code convinced a generation of programmers that Pascal sucked. Still, the microcomputer world got a lot of work done with Turbo Pascal in the 1980s. It wasn't until the rise of Microsoft (a C shop) and the fall of Borland (a Pascal shop) that Pascal was crushed. One could argue that the decline of Pascal reflects Microsoft's dominance.
I really liked this interview, as it gave me some insight on how those Old Masters of Coding of the Days of Yore think. Or, at least, one of them. Here's the first thing that got my attention:
...the areas that are difficult are only two: one that it's too hard to write programs that work, and the other that it's too hard to use computers. So if you want things to work on, these are two that you could try.
Teaching students skills so that they can step immediately into a Windows development shop and are able to write COM programs is just not right. That's not what universities should be doing; universities should be teaching things which are likely to last, for a lifetime if you're lucky, but at least 5 or 10 or 20 years, and that means principles and ideas. At the same time, they should be illustrating them with the best possible examples taken from current practice.
Now if only this interview was posted earlier, we could've used it on the discussion about what makes a good CS project a few weeks ago, which you can find here on Slashdot.
The other thing is I liked the most about this interview was this quote:
I think I'm gonna frame this and hang it right beside my computer screen. Or append it on any bill we send to our clients.
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
C is a loaded gun aimed at your foot; C++ is a Gatling gun aimed at your head. Describing C as much, much more powerful than C++ isn't just wrong, it's ridiculous.
Neither one is more powerful than the other. What the hell does "power" mean in a programming language, anyway? The word has no definition in a programming context.
The only relevant question, IMO, is which is the right tool for the job?
Sometimes, the job requires procedural programming. For that, procedural C++ or C is called for. Sometimes, the job requires object-oriented programming. For that, C++ or object-oriented C is called for. Sometimes, the job requires generic programming. For that, C++ or really hoary C is called for.
C++ is probably more versatile than C, but it comes at significant cost--compilers become complex, the STL is difficult to maintain, etc.
There is no clear "more powerful" language. Use the right tool for the job.
And insofar as operator overloading in C++... I use it all the time. Where's the problem?
What is your goal? How time do you have? Who do you have on staff? How many line of code are expected? Answer these question and you would know why you would pick C over C++ or C++ over C. Ok
flamebait. Go back to the old country, wherever it is, and slap the professor who taught you English grammar.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
http://www.maths.lancs.ac.uk/~greenrm /its.html
leanness and predictability.
I posted before I read Kernighan's comments about ML (nicely put, I
guess I agree with him), and if Scheme is less an `academic' language
than ML, you do need to grok higher-order functions to get the most
out of it. My own guess is that in the very long term, functional
languages will win out, but that's a long, long way off yet.
Slashdot is a good source of links, but is fundamentally content-free. Reading it like this is just as useful.
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
I found it very interesting (as I was getting sick of BillG overusing the word "innovation"), but after reading it I kinda agree with him. Now who has any new open-source ideas ?
Note that in the below code, the value of x is cast to a void pointer y (implicitly, not explicitly--bad programming form, but done here only to show it can be done without the compiler complaining; explicit casting can similarly be done), and y is cast back to an integer variable. This code is legal ANSI C++, and compiles under egcs-2.91 with -Wall -ansi -pedantic without error or warning.
Production C++ code ought to use static_cast instead of these C-style casts (enhances type safety). I'm using C-style casts here for ease of reading.
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main(void)
{
int x = 123;
void *y =
int z = *(int *)y;
cout << z << endl;
}
Go back to the old country, wherever it is, and slap the professor who taught you English grammar.
Now, now... it's not fair picking on someone just because he doesn't write English as well as you'd like. It's not as if it's easy to learn proper English merely by taking a couple of courses at school! Even less when we're probably dealing with some indio bajado del cerro a tamborazos.
However, I have to agree, he's an idiot, and as far as I'm concerned, it's open season on them all year long.
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
http://fsfeurope.org/
The next frame takes place "sometime next week..."
Dilbert and Wally at the copier:
Wally: (looking at the wall) "Hey, that looks like a rift in the space-time continuum." Dilbert: "Did you just hear a snap?""Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
My take is that only a small percentage of programmers have ever really got the oo paradigm.
Natilie Portman
This chick from sales with big tits
Miss Feburary 1974 (from playboy)
2. Why would you choose those females?
N.P - It is Miss Portman; I mean *duh!*
Sales Chick - she is a hottie
Miss 1974 - She was in the first Playboy I ever owned/found; she is a life long dream.
3. What kind of stone (or other immobile substance, natural or manmade) would you transform them into?
N.P - bronze
Sales Chick - Balsa Wood
Miss 1974 - bronze plated aluminum
4. Describe the pose each girl would be in.
N.P - casual stance
Sales Chick - Sitting
Miss 1974 - on all fours in the doggie-style position
5. Describe the facial expression each girl would have.
N.P. - a normail relaxed expression
sales Chick - a bored, what-am-I-doing-here look
Miss 1974 - a look of total extacy
6. Explain what each girl would be wearing, if anything.
N.P. - A mini skirt and a blouse that show-cases her tits.
Sales Chick - Standard issue work outfit
Miss 1974 - totally nude
7. Explain what you would do with the girls after they were petrified.
N.P. - Go out have have tacos. Light conversation.
Sales Chick - I would sit her next to me in my car so I could use the HOV lane on the Dulles Toll Road and on 495.
Miss 1974 - Hard core sex
Thanks for your participation!
You are welcome, I hope I helped!
While C++ may lose to C in the executable size, C++ has minimal loss to C when it comes to speed. The mantra of C++ is you don't pay for what you don't use, and most compilers do a pretty good job of living up to it.
In the early days of Objective C, its performance was piss-poor due to its habitual late binding (putting off as many decisions to run-time as possible). C++ won, in part, because its early binding made for much faster code.
If you can't write C++ code which blazes by faster than a jackrabbit on amphetamines, that's a problem with your skill, not the language.
So get a C compiler with garbage collection. Better yet, just get a li brary for it.
I'd like to note that this was a *great* interview and I'd love to see more interviews done by Mihai.
:-)
There are so many wannbe tech journalists out there that it's good to read an interview conducted by someone who know the subject's favourite subject.
Yes, I am aware that Brian did most of the talking. But hey, only the right questions trigger interesting answers.
So thanks Mihai. If your career in research fails, consider making interviews with the heroes of computer science.
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You may like my a cappella music
>Creating a 'high-level' language in which the >rogrammer must worry about allocating memory and leaks is a bad thing. Please. What do you want- garbage collection? Back then it would have taken more of the processor than the application. Even now its a noticeable lag. Memory leaks are a problem only if you cant program worth a damn, or your specs are totally FUBAR. >Creating a language where no one can quite determine how multiple inheritence works is a bad thing. I understand it perfectly. Class C, inherited from both A and B, has all the public/protected members of both. Not hard. >In a high level language, one should be able to implement a stack in under 8 lines. Now this is bad reasoning. Thats completely opinionated. You can't do it in C, C++, Pascal, or Java. You can do it in perl only because of the push and pop functions. Please tell me why a language needs to be able to do a stack in 8 lines, Im dying to know. >They should have left it there and gone on with lisp or ML. God no. ML? ANd have to have the output of every if statement the same on both the if andd else parts? To have to have an else? Its useless in the real world. Go back to academia.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
C was a successor to B, which was a successor to BCPL. The "B" just came from the first letter of BCPL. It was deliberately left unspecified whether the choice of "C" was the next letter in the alphabet, or the next letter in BCPL (i.e., would C's successor be "D" or "P").
// end-of-line comments came from either BCPL or B, were removed in C, and were re-added in C++.
Trivia for you: the
There's some really cool stuff on the history of C on Dennis Ritchie's homepage. Which I can't find right now.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
A nice example of what functional languages can be used for--besides compiler construction is--the current Internatiobal Contest for Functional Programming. The task was to build a ray tracer within 72 hours. The entry of the Objective Caml team is especially impressive.
At the beginning was at.
I think more of the newer users of Linux should read a little more about people like this and a few other more important "personalities"
I agree in a big way. Ever notice how the really important people, when asked about their favorite language/editor/IDE/window-manager/etc, usually answer along the lines of, "Oh, I'm comfortable with about all of them; I can switch languages as needed; I use more than one of <whatever>."
I was re-reading a 1995 issue of IEEE-CS "Computer" magazine, and one of the articles was pointing out that bigots and advocates of a single method or a single approach or a single tool (e.g., langugage, editor, what have you) were invariably beginners and novices with little experience or useful education. Skilled programmers and designers know how to be flexible.
The newer users of Linux, as you say, should take note of this before starting the next flame war.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
stack S;
- My password is slashdot
stack <int> S;
- My password is slashdot
What is STL?
Yes, but Scheme doesn't look like C. Read the article again, and replace 'ML' with 'Scheme', or whatever your favorite functional language is.
;)
Also, remember:
1) BWK is sympathetic to your plight.
2) Think that perhaps one reason why he picked 'C' is that he could probably write Scheme in C if he really had to, but you could never write C in Scheme, and if you did, it'd be too slow. If you ever manage to write an optimizing C compiler in Scheme, though, hat's off to you. I'd be impressed just by the assembler... Therefore, in the long run, I think he'd be better off with his choice.
But yeah, I kinda like Scheme too. I might try writing it in Perl sometime.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Pretty much every day I still use eqn(1). It provides a clean, straight-forward, easy to remember way of describing equations. It's about 600% faster than using MS Word's whacked out equation editor.
I'll note here that unlike TeX, Word Perfect, MathML, MS Word, WordStar or whatever other thing you've got, my eqn/tbl/troff from 1977 still formats correctly and gracefully. The only thing about my documents had that changed were SCCS became RCS.
Those who use fads to create their documents (MS Word version XXX for example) don't plan on reusing their words which is just as stupid as not reusing code.
What the hell does "power" mean in a programming language, anyway? The word has no definition in a programming context.
Let's look at the general physics definition, taken from the American Heritage dictionary.
power: n - The rate at which work is done, expressed as the amount of work per unit time and commonly measured in units such as the watt and horsepower.
I'd suggest that power exhibited in the programming-language context would be something like this:
power: n - The rate at which programming work is done, expressed as the amount of programming tasks written per unit time and commonly measured in units such as statements or lines of source code.
This is only one interpretation, mind you. Higher-level languages would thus be deemed more powerful than lower-level languages, as the source-code to machine-code ratio is more extreme. It takes fewer statements or lines of source code to express a program task in a more powerful language.
[
At some point though, the novelty of it wears off and you realize you can't get anything really useful done in it and you move on to something will powerful APIs and something natively supported by your OS (such as C).
You can hardly put TeX and MathML in the same category as the rest?
MathML is a totally clean, portable way of describing equations. AFAIK it's much cleaner than eqn with it's idiosyncracies.
Meanwhile, TeX is the choice of most mathematicians for publishing papers. It's changed very little over recent years, hardly like Word.
"I think that the open-source movement is in general a good thing. I am not sure that it will ever replace tailored, professional, rock-solid commercial products sold for profit."
:P
Where can I get that?!
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~
~
:wq
(A great programmer, on the other hand, uses a very high-level-language (ie. Python), and then profiles the code and rewrites the bits that really need the speed in a lower level language (ie. C/C++). The programmer thus achieves far greater productivity. The time saved can be dedicated to improving the code even more, or adding additional functionality, or performing very extended fault/bug testing, or moving onto another project.)
<snark mode off>
Erm. Ah, did anyone hear anything?
Oh. I thought not. Nevermind, it must have just been my imagination. Sorry.
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
I know, because I recently asked this question on the OSI license discussion list. The major flaws in the Plan 9 license being that AT&T can require you to provide your private changes (ones that you havent distributed to anyone), and also revoke your ability to use the code should you file suit against AT&T.
I only bring this up because the interview incorrectly refers to this OS as "Open-source". It isnt.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
I'm sorry, but you really need to address this to the guys in Congress and your own armies who need the military-industrial conspiracy to keep their careers going. Normal Americans couldn't give a flying rat's ass about South America and don't really care if their neighbor does a little coke, although at this point it's relatively passe in polite company.
Unfortunately it'll probably be the peasants who gets killed more than anyone, and unfortunately that's probably not you. You can blame everyone else for your troubles but if you had the backbone to get rid of the corrupt dictators that run your banana republics you might have a chance at a stable democracy. And it would help, if you want anyone to take you seriously, if you could drop the macho attitude which stereotypes Latin males as hot-headed assholes. Your people really deserve better; you could help by not being such an asshole yourself.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
God, he was at the center of everything, and still is quite in touch with the state of computer science and computing today. As cheesy as this sounds: he is my idol!!
I am also quite in awe of the whole research environment over there at Lucent. I really wish I could get a shot at working there. I sort of guess I will be doomed to be a web programmer for ever... :(
Not trolling here: you are blinkering yourself it you don't see any validity in bringing Java into a conversation about C/C++.
Java skills are now in higher demand than C/C++ skills in the UK - taken from a recent survey of the job adverts in the IT sector over the previous year.
-
The advantage of C++ is that it's a hell of a toolbox. You've got hammers, screwdrivers, chisels and even a fully-functioning wood lathe (watch me turn this chunk of hoary code into a table leg!). Good programmers use the right tool for the job.
As a Java programmer, I preffer the C toolbox to the C++ toolbox. The C toolbox contains all your hammers, screwdrivers, chisels, etc. The C++ toolbox contains this lot and also sticks of dynamite, nooses of rope and gattling guns. Useful, I expect, but everything ends up as the same machine code at the end of the day, and the C++ toolbox is a bit risky for some people's liking [subjective opinion].cheers,
G
Good comment, although System 3 does have a window-based GUI as well as the track-viewer interface. Oberon is the bomb. If you are a real programmer and examine Oberon critically you will understand this. If there is anyone who disagrees let him post.
...Brian Kernighan coined the name "UNIX" as a joke in responce to Ken Thompson's stripped down MULTICS kernal that he created to play his spacewar game on an abandonded PDP-7. Maybe not a big deal, but most things don't survive without name, let alone one that piques curiosity, so maybe so.
I didn't mention that I'm a Java hacker, because I didn't see it was particularly relevant. :)
;)
;)
My general attitude on Java is "those who do not understand C++ are condemned to reinvent it, poorly" (sorry, Henry Spencer)--this is a reasoned opinion, one I've come to after some study of the issues involved; I only bring it up now to make sure that you're aware of my bias.
As a Java programmer, I [prefer] the C toolbox to the C++ toolbox. The C toolbox contains all your hammers, screwdrivers, chisels, etc. The C++ toolbox contains this lot and also sticks of dynamite, nooses of rope and [Gatling] guns.
Wholeheartedly agreed. Anyone who tries to sell C++ (specifically, object oriented C++) as being the One True Way is probably smoking too much ganja. At the same time, though, there are occasions when you need pure, unadulterated power, and for those times, C++ exists.
Java seems, to my mind, to almost be a subset of C++, one in which the most dangerous features of C++ have been removed--pointers, generic programming, multiple inheritance, etc. There's something to be said for this approach, in that very few C++ programmers can use multiple inheritance, generics and so on well. But those of us who can use them well get really annoyed that Java denies them to us.
My biggest objection to C++ is that it takes a very long time--on the order of years--to become a good C++ programmer. I think, though, that it's plenty worth the effort.
As usual, most people who say "language foo is better than language bar" don't understand foo, bar, or the problem they're trying to solve in languages foo and bar. The world is filled with interesting problems to be solved. Languages are tools; and there's a lot to be said for personal preference, and comfort level, with one's tools.
I had the old guy as my professor for CS50, which is the first computer class you take at Harvard. It was nice to see him bitch about people being trained in Visual C++; I assume he was complaining about Princeton, because at Harvard it was strictly C on Unix. (C++ was taught in CS51, but still in a Unix environment.)
He is an incredibly endearing fellow. In the first class, to demonstrate the concept of an algorithm, he had the class (of 400+) shout out instructions on how to make him trim his beard. He spread out several instruments of cutting (including a small chain saw...the guy has a nice sense of humor) on the desk in front of him, and would ignore any directions that comprised more than one action. So, if somebody would say "Pick up the scissors!" he would reply, robot like, "What are scissors?"
So, you'd have to say things like "Extend your right hand 4 inches", etc. In the end, he even cut of a small amount of his beard, to the immense cheers of the class.
He's one of the more intriguing characters in CS history, the "k" in "awk", always tagging along on some of the more interesting projects in (C, Unix), but never really striking out on his own.
The cool thing is, he is very self deprecating and would be the first person to admit his shortcomings.
Awesome professor, as his enthusiasm for even the simple aspects is always evident. He loves the stuff, and thus you want to love it as well.
A cool note, he is the person who invented the concept of creating a program to print "Hello world".
Man, that's right on. Except that they taught us Dylan (I hear they do Scheme now) at my university.
M: Actually C is also my favorite programming language, and I've written a lot of programs in it, but since I began writing compilers for C, I have to confess I've begun to like it less. Some things are very hard to optimize. Can you tell us about the worse features of C, from your point of view?
*shrug* I thought it was ironic.
"I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious." - Albert Einstein
Yay!
I didn't think anyone with a keyboard cared about such things. Angryflower seems to have forgotten one of my favorite peeves:
you SHOULD add an apostrophe (only) when making a possesive out of a word ending in "s":
"The cats' bags were out on the town..."
I see this a lot, in places like the NY Times. I place the blame on spell checkers. We've become a lazy point-click-forget race of lazy proofreaders. And curmudgeons, too!
Meanwhile, TeX is the choice of most mathematicians for publishing papers. It's changed very little over recent years, hardly like Word.
Yes. Still the standard, in most research circles. And Tex (LaTeX, etc) has the backwards compatibility most such tools only dream of. While the language and tools have grown over the years, they always grow 'outward', continuing to deal perfectly with existing documents - useful for those of us needing to print out decades-old preprints!
Long live TeX!
When I was at UC Santa Cruz (back in '84) there was a lot of debate among the student community about whether theoretical or more practical classes should be taught. IIRC, the board kept the theoretical emphasis, but gave a few practical classes.
Mr. Kernighan hits the nail on the head. The theory I learned has lasted for the past 15 years. Any "practical" programming I learned was pretty much out of date. Heck, we used Pascal as the main language...
Good for him!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I just took a TCL class from AjubaSolutions and wrote some of scheme in TCL while the instructor was talking.
It cdr worked if I had more time.
Ohhhhh I'm up all night again. There's no substitute for brains.
TeX wasn't viable in 1977. troff was. LaTeX even later. If I were starting over, perhaps I'd choose TeX. Though many of you will argue, there are people that think that Professor Knuth's vision of typeography isn't the world vision. TeX looks ok. Troff looks ok. Both could probably be better, not that most of us would recognize better if it walked up and bit us.
MathML is way to new to know if it is going anywhere real -- eligance not withstanding (I like MathML). MS Word version 6.0 is older than MathML is and we know how viable that format is over the long-haul. Now a MathML to troff converter (I've not looked, is there one?) might be interesting in oh say another 5 years after we know if MathML is done or going to suffer from creaping featureism.
In the end, there are markup languages and there are WYSIWYG editors. The markup languages tend to stabile longer and that makes them a much more viable candidate for words that have any hope of being reused.
I'll note here (marginally) that if you are under 25 or 30 years old, the idea of a document being a program is probably just weird. Most big documents should be viewed as such. My books, my PhD dissertation and most of my other major documents are under revision control (RCS) and are constructed with make(1). It is neat to be able to go back and get an old paper and know that it can be reprinted reliably, it will look the same, and that I can steal pieces of it with zero trouble. Ponder doing that with a Wordstar document made on your CPM system in 1977...
Oddly, make(1) has become the largest stability issue to going back to older documents since Berkeley and GNU keep screwing with make in a mis-guided vision of 'oh we'll make it better'. Make is a time dependency file constructor. If you want to make it something else, then call it bmake, gmake, mmake, lmake, fake or weve_lost_sight_of_makes_purpose, just leave the original make alone please.
Have you noticed the following interview question fragment:
"Instead all sorts of ad-hoc languages pop up like Perl or Python or stuff like that. Where do you see the fault; what's not right?"
My question is: "What's not right" with Perl or Python, but is with C? C has also not emerged from Academia, but from industry and it answered an immediate practical need, as Perl & Python had...
The interviewer is a little bit inconsistent bashing Perl and Python using arguments that apply to C as well...
Sorin Gherman
C, and a variety of shells, used many of the features of Algol 68. Pascal was, in many respects, Wirth's attempt to prove that you could have a smaller language than Algol 68 but still be as explressive.
Yes,... but is that plus or minus one?
All opinions are my own - until criticized
"Sometimes I do write C++ instead of C. C++ I think is basically too big a language, although there's a reason for almost everything that's in it. When I write a C program of any size, I probably will wind-up using 75, 80, 90% of the language features. In other words, most of the language is useful in almost any kind of program. By contrast, if I write in C++ I probably don't use even 10% of the language, and in fact the other 90% I don't think I understand."
One of the problems with development in *nix is the huge legacy of C, while this provides a much more gradual learning slope than C++ it also limits the power of the programmer as applications become more complex. Unfortunately most of the Major open source projects are C based and C++ APIs and documentation are a poor cousin, with less developers and therefore maturity.
I will be glad when C++ APIs and documentation and available libraries and source reach the current levels for C. Of course I will still use C and Perl as they are often the best tool for the job - in fact I use them almost exclusively. C++ and Java though are definately essential for some jobs if you want the job done elegantly and or quickly and without horrible kludges.
[1] GTK uses OO-like C which although quite nice to program with can sometimes be a pain the **** (not as godawful as win32 tho *shudder*), of course most *nix code is in C so its easier use it.
Perl & C Hacker
I don't get the point about `powerful APIs', but you might have a
look at the scheme2c compiler which has excellent support for linking
C libraries into scheme code.
Well...I meant to implement the template, but it is a dumb debate anyway.
The last question in the interview dealt with hobbies, and BK said that he goes through 3-5 year cycles where he gets deeply involved in a subject, but he sort of lets it slide. I kind of do the same thing. I tell people my hobby is picking up new hobbies. Does anybody else out there do this?
One of the goals of the MathML design team is intercovertibility with TeX. Id MathML proves to be a fad, there should already *be* a converter into TeX.
Plus, please! ^_^
-RickHunter
I don't wish to seem bitchy,
but if only old Ritchie
had been strangled at birth by a nurse.
And the fate that I've planned
for all Kernighan's clan,
is unprintably several times worse.
...
Part of an poem from an old mag. Can't remember which, though.
I'm 20 and fairly used to documents containing active code. But, what really puzzles me is why the ascii manpage isn't generated on the fly?
Although embedded code in documents can be very cool (ie postscript), I really do prefer some division of code and layout. Hence, I have a really nice Java FAQ written in SGML, using make it's automagically rendered and contorted into LaTeX, pdf, ps, plain text and HTML. It's really nice to have a single source format without any embedded code, that way it can be easily reused.I have to disagree with some of this ... absolutely true that BCPL was a pretty nasty language, and it was without doubt the ancestor of C, which cleaned it up nicely. I rember picking up a copy of it from Colin Whitby-Strevens at Warwick University in 1977. Anyone remember the DEC RK05 disk? BCPL was not much fun, though its expression orientedness was intriguing.
... aaagh. Kernighan's paper says it all!
During the 70s Pascal became a popular programming language in *some* academic circles, but the systems-oriented people latched onto Unix and C pretty quickly. Wirth himself admitted that he disigned Pascal as a teaching language rather than a programming language and it really showed. C on the other hand, was written by people who knew operating systems - although it was Ritchie's work, it was written so that the early Unix kernel, previously written in assembler mostly by Thompson, could be written in a high level language instead. Having a real task to do, not just demonstrate language features, it *had* to be useful and effective from a systems programmer's point of view. I agree with Kernighan - it's still a very good small language.
It is VERY worth while to dig up a copy of Kernighan's critique of Pascal "Why Pascal is not my favourite programming language", written circa 1982 if memory serves me well.
It's long been my belief that the real reason for the success of C was the emergence of the IBM PC in the early 80s. It was essential on those things at the time to talk directly to the video card, hook interrupts and so on - just the sort of stuff that was near-impossible in Pascal and almost trivial in C. Good quality C compilers rapidly became available and since C code could be made largely portable between Unix and the IBM PC, thanks to the stdio library, C became the 'language of choice' for serious systems developers. What strangled Pascal was the lack of separate compilation and poor support in terms of libraries, whilst C's libraries grew and grew.
At the end of the day, C was fit for purpose (as was Pascal, but its purpose was very limited) - and since what most people wanted to do was what C let them do, it won hands-down. Pascal could only be used on single-person projects. C allowed a team to work. No contest.
From a personal perspective, Pascal was also unpleasant to use. Its bondage-and-domination type system was fine for undergraduates who needed a safety-rope, but if you needed to close to the metal it just got in your way at every step. No initialised data - everything done in assignments
Mike
Both are in the Dilbert compilation: "Casual Day Has Gone Too Far." I think it's a must have for slashdotters (well, at least the Computer Holy Wars section).
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
But the Ocaml guys won't win: they've used comments quite blatently on at least a couple of lines, and as soon as the functional community notices, they'll be excommunicated and ostracized for life.
Just imagine what would happen if it caught on and comments in functional programs became commonplace. People would actually be able to figure out what functions were intended to do, and decades of good work would go down the drain. Heaven forbid!
But it gets worse: this team has even used descriptive identifiers in a couple of places. Shock horror, whatever next -- code walkthroughs?!
[PS. This comment may actually be a half-serious answer to the question of why FP has never had an impact outside of academia. Apparently FP programmers don't consider that the "software crisis" and maintainability have any relevance to them.]
[PPS. I like ML. Languages aren't obscure, only programmers.]
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Well, you may be right.. people in academics and research really think that languages like scheme and ml are underused despite their power and expressiveness. Take a look at the kernighan interview: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/ ~mihaib/kernighan-interview/index.html
I don't see how (begin is less clear than {, or (vector-ref a n) inherently less clear than a[n]. Having everything in the language be of the form (verb object ...) is a lot like English.
You'll have to elaborate on your criticism of dynamic typing. AFAIK its only downside is performance, assuming you don't have a compiler that infers types.
A variant of Scheme is already my language of choice for database-driven web apps. The language is as simple or difficult as whatever it is you're trying to do.