Re: [9fans] tcl, 9p

[erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>]

On Mon Oct 10 09:52:36 EDT 2011, ph.softnet@gmail.com wrote:
> It's not necessary that you're feeding a troll, in my opinion.
> I actually agree with the idea that C is enough.
> I don't understand why you need garbage collection ... why do you need
> to have garbage in the first place?
> Just because time goes by does not mean everything should keep on
> changing you know.
> People have to understand that certain technologies can just stay as
> they are, if they work well.

"need" is such a funny word.  we don't need keyboards, we can just use
toggles.  there have been a few other trivial improvments in the day-to-day
lives of programmers like bitmap displays, which real computer scientists can ignore.

so as time goes on, it's easy for programmers to get a whiggish view of the world.
but you're equally correct, that the mere passage of time between x and y is not
an argument that either is better.

so we're left only to argue this one on the merits of garbage collection.  :-)
now that i think of it, garbage collection was invented more than a decade
before c.  so the preceeding two paragraphs have been argued in the moot
court.  in any event, i think one can consider manual memory management
to often be akin to manually managing registerization.  there is a good chance
that in most cases that an automatic and systematic process can do a better
job than an ad hoc one.

yet, i program in c most of the time.  i don't know of many operating
systems written in a automaticly gc'd language.

- erik