On Friday 18 February 2005 10:39, Frank Wiles wrote:
Actually Perl was around first and is still to this day more successfully platform independent that Java. While I agree that Java/Perl/C#/etc will never be "as fast" as a well written C program, the difference these days is so small it doesn't matter.
If you're really worried about the couple of milliseconds difference you are spending your time worrying about the wrong things.
The cost/time difference of developing an application in C vs the speed benefit just doesn't make sense. Save yourself 75% of the development time and put $20 more processor in your box. ;)
Well, famous quotes are dime-a-dozen but this one comes from Alan Kay, the inventor of SmallTalk and quite possibly one of the more brilliant people alive in Computer Science, today:
"Like I said, it’s a pop culture. A commercial hit record for teenagers doesn’t have to have any particular musical merits. I think a lot of the success of various programming languages is expeditious gap-filling. Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term. Basically, a lot of the problems that computing has had in the last 25 years comes from systems where the designers were trying to fix some short-term thing and didn’t think about whether the idea would scale if it were adopted. There should be a half-life on software so old software just melts away over 10 or 15 years."[1]
Not to say that a nice bang-up language isn't useful every now-and-then but it's hardly a reason to throw C away.
And before you flame Alan, he also said later in the interview that he didn't know anyone alive that knew how to design a good programming language.
[1] http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=273&...
The whole interview is a great read.