In the age of dynamic languages and closures, most of you have probably heard of a mighty dragon called Lisp (which stands for LISt Processing), whose fans look almost with despise at other languages rediscovering it. Invented half a century ago, Lisp went on to become a de facto standard in the world of AI research, and has stood behind a handful of very neat inventions in the 1980s. Nevertheless, the long AI winter and the drift of technology towards other paradigms have almost lead to forgetting Lisp alltogether; IT has only recently started to rediscover parts of what made Lisp so cool back then.
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Member since:2006-02-05
C was designed to be a high level portable language, not to do "low level stuff". It was the C# or Java of its time, when everything was done in asm.
C# isn't just rolling random features in, if you look at the last few releases it is obviously trying to roll some of the reasons that functional and dynamic languages are so awesome into a statically typed language while still maintaining clarity and performance.
Not only that, but the IT industry that you are disparaging is taking a good look at functional languages like LISP right now. There is a huge interest in Haskell, Erlang, and F# as a way to leverage parallelism in a smart way and to deal with certain types of problems that OO doesn't handle well.
Member since:2005-07-06
C is designed to be general purpose high level language, however, it is practically not good at developing large complex user applications, especially, those business applications which have to be fast-written and change greatly from one domain to another. C does not free programmer from taking extra care of low-level things.
Member since:2008-06-07
No. At the time C was invented, the mainstream high level languages were COBOL, FORTRAN, Algol and PL/I. These languages do not handle e.g. pointers and bit operations as well as C does.
C was invented specifically as a system programming language (so they wouldn't have to rewrite OS for different architectures).
Member since:
2005-07-06
Dude, you really got the point. In so-called "IT" industry, the most worthless thing is the technology. Money is the real boss. Lisp itself is good. It evolves smoothly, in contrast, languages like java or C# are just evolution dead-end. I saw the talk about the future of C#, my impression is that these C# guys is doing the same thing as those C++ people did to C. They are just patching the existing language. And the result is that we end up with a language with awfully complicated syntax and semantics.
Why these guys like C flavor so much? I mean C is good, it is also an evolution dead end, but it is OK for C because C is designed to do low level programming such as writing kernels, device drivers or system programming, and this kind of jobs rarely changes. In contrast, languages like java or C# are different, they are mostly used in business world, and business changes fast.
Edited 2009-01-05 22:02 UTC