[TUHS] Re: [TUHS]: C dialects

[Luther Johnson <luther@makerlisp.com>]

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I agree with everything you just said here.

One of the motivations behind new dialects and languages, which I think 
is very harmful, is the idea that we can and should, engineer the 
necessity to know and understand what we are doing when we program in a 
given language. I'm not talking about semantic leverage, higher level 
languages with more abstract functions on more abstract data, there are 
real benefits there, we will all probably agree to that.

I'm talking more about where the intent is to invest languages with more 
"safety", "good practices", to bake certain preferences into language 
features, so that writers no longer recognize these as engineering 
choices, and the language as a means of expression of any choice we 
might make, but that the language has built-in "the right way" to do 
things, and if the program compiles and runs at all, then it must be 
safe and working in certain respects.

No matter what language, craft and knowledge are not optional. The 
language that we choose for a problem domain wants to give us freedom to 
express our choices, while taking care of the things that wold otherwise 
weigh us down. Some people would say that's exactly what the new 
dialects bring us, but I see too much artificial orthodoxy invented last 
week, and too many declarations of the "one true way", in many of the 
most recent languages, for my taste.

On 03/13/2023 12:00 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
>
>
> On Mon, Mar 13, 2023 at 12:00 PM Paul Winalski 
> <paul.winalski@gmail.com <mailto:paul.winalski@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     ... Thecommittee's goal is to standardize existing practice of the
>     language
>     in a way that is implementable on the widest range of hardware and OS
>     platforms, _/and to provide a controlled way to add language
>     extensions./_
>
> Ah, the problem, of course, is right there.
>
> Too many people try to "fix" programming languages, particularly 
> academics and folks working on a new PhD. Other folks (Gnu is the best 
> example IMO) want to change things so the compiler writers (and it 
> seems like the Linux kernel developers) can do something "better" or 
> "more easily." As someone (I think Dan Cross) said, when that happens, 
> it's no longer C. Without Dennis here to say "whoa," - the 
> committee is a tad open loop.   Today's language is hardly the 
> language I learned before the "White Book" existed in the early/mid 
> 1970s.  It's actually quite sad.   I'm not so sure we are "better" off.
>
> Frankly, I'd probably rather see ISO drop a bunch of the stuff they 
> are now requiring and fall back at least to K&R2 -- keep it simple. 
> The truth is that we still use the language today is that K&R2 C was 
> then (and still is) good enough and got (gets) the job done extremely 
> well. Overall, I'm not sure all the new "features" have added all that 
> much.
> ᐧ


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