Posted by
CowboyNeal
on from the eye-to-the-future dept.
newdaemon writes "Fortune
has a candid
interview
with Bill Joy about what he plans to do after leaving Sun and his opinions on many other topics, including his strong dislike of the C programming language and how the internet could evolve to take care of the problem of spam and viruses."
Java is only one of the languages that completely prevent stuff like buffer overrun exploits etc. In fact, pretty much every single language except C and C++ do.
Except that's wrong. Running Hello World involves booting up what is, in effect, an entire operating system (the Java VM, with virtual memory, threading, everything, the works).
Ok, here's an experiment:
a) run Hello World in Java
b) run Hello World in C (including booting up Linux)
Which one is faster?:-)
--
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"
Re:Java : C :: Emacs : vi
by
Raffaello
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The whole Turing completeness argument is a straw man. If it were really true, we'd all still be coding individual 1s and 0s, since, after all, "You can do the same thing in one language that you can in any other."
The real issue is which language is more expressive. Since I can accomplish any task with any of the dozens of Turing complete languages, which language lets me accomplish the task at hand in the fewest lines of code?
The answer may vary from task to task, but if the task includes the requirement that the finished product be secure, then C loses, because it doesn't protect against one of the most common sorts of attack at the language level, buffer overruns. Common Lisp and Java do. To have this same sort of protection in C, I'd have to write all the additional lines necessary to implement my own runtime to prevent direct access to memory. Hey! I've just re-implemented *part* of Common Lisp, or *part* of Java.
Thus we come to Greenspun's 10th law of programming:
"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
You wrote: "Oh well, I guess that's what makes people so interesting. The plethora of personalities. Doesn't mean he's right, though." Bill Joy's opinion that C is a really dangerous language isn't a quirk of his personality. It's an evaluation based on decades of experience as a pioneer in the computer industry, and a deep understanding of the fact that different languages really are better or worse.
Slashdot Mirror
Java is only one of the languages that completely prevent stuff like buffer overrun exploits etc. In fact, pretty much every single language except C and C++ do.
Ok, here's an experiment:
a) run Hello World in Java
b) run Hello World in C (including booting up Linux)
Which one is faster? :-)
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"The whole Turing completeness argument is a straw man. If it were really true, we'd all still be coding individual 1s and 0s, since, after all, "You can do the same thing in one language that you can in any other."
The real issue is which language is more expressive. Since I can accomplish any task with any of the dozens of Turing complete languages, which language lets me accomplish the task at hand in the fewest lines of code?
The answer may vary from task to task, but if the task includes the requirement that the finished product be secure, then C loses, because it doesn't protect against one of the most common sorts of attack at the language level, buffer overruns. Common Lisp and Java do. To have this same sort of protection in C, I'd have to write all the additional lines necessary to implement my own runtime to prevent direct access to memory. Hey! I've just re-implemented *part* of Common Lisp, or *part* of Java.
Thus we come to Greenspun's 10th law of programming:
"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
You wrote:
"Oh well, I guess that's what makes people so interesting. The plethora of personalities. Doesn't mean he's right, though."
Bill Joy's opinion that C is a really dangerous language isn't a quirk of his personality. It's an evaluation based on decades of experience as a pioneer in the computer industry, and a deep understanding of the fact that different languages really are better or worse.