From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: erik quanstrom Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2011 17:16:44 -0400 To: 9fans@9fans.net Message-ID: In-Reply-To: References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Re: [9fans] tcl, 9p Topicbox-Message-UUID: 35d5bb22-ead7-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 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