Re: C++ religious war (was: llua Higher-level C API for Lua)

[Sean Conner <sean@...>]

It was thus said that the Great Jeremy Ong once stated:
> 
> I think the real war that should be waged is the one between people
> who think that there is "one true language" and those that are more
> polyglot oriented.

  Another axis to view this on is "tools vs. langauge" [1].  I don't use an
IDE [2] and thus, I'm free to pick any langauge I want, and not have the
language forced on me because of the environment [5].

  That said, I am a language snob, and given my preference, will NOT use C++
(because it's damn near impossible to know the entire langauge), PHP
(because they know not what the hell they're doing [6]), Perl (because there
is more than one way to everything, so you better know them all or you can't
read Perl) or Python (significant white space---possibly forgivable in
Fortran 66, a sin in anything designed past 1970).

  Is C perfect?  No [7].  But it's simple enough to understand.  So is Lua.  

  -spc (So is assembly, but that's so simple, it borders on tedium)

[1]	http://blog.osteele.com/posts/2004/11/ides

[2]	I can't stand them.  I never have.  Initially because the built in
	editors sucked [3] but now, it's because they tend to lock you into
	a single language.  Sure, they *may* say they can do cross-language
	development, but last I checked [4], Eclipse consistently crashed
	when I tried loading up two simple C files (a .c and its
	corresponding .h file).  

[3]	To give an indication about how long ago this was, I'm talking about
	Turbo Pascal 3, and shortly thereafter, Turbo Pascal 4, which
	changed the editor environtment completely.

[4]	Last year.

[5]	I downloaded Eclipse.  It could deal with Java only.  If I wanted to
	edit C/C++ files, I had to download an entirely different copy. 
	Perhaps there was a way to edit Java, C and C++ with the same
	engine?  I don't know.  I decided to stop wasting my time with
	Eclipse and keep using the same editor I've been using for twenty
	years.

[6]	"I was really, really bad at writing parsers. I still am really bad
	at writing parsers. We have things like protected properties. We
	have abstract methods. We have all this stuff that your computer
	science teacher told you you should be using. I don't care about
	this crap at all."
		-- Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP

	"I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works
	then I move on. The real programmers will say "yeah it works but
	you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that." I'll
	just restart apache every 10 requests."
		-- also Rasmus Lerdorf

[7]	One obvious flaw is the pointer syntax.  But another, lesser known
	(or quite possibly it's just me) flaw are function prototypes for
	static functions.  Why do I need them?  This isn't 1970 anymore.  We
	don't have to strive for a one-or-two-pass compiler anymore.  Just
	scan ahead looking for static functions, then do a second pass for
	the compilation step.  How hard is this?  Sheesh.