Programming language failings [was Re: strangest systems I've sent email from]

On Fri, Apr 29, 2016 at 12:59 PM, Ian S. King <isking at uw.edu> wrote: The problem is that C doesn't just allow you to do stupid things, it's actively encouraged. C doesn't just let you aim at your foot, it defaults to aiming at your foot. C is not bad as a fairly portable assembly language, but it is NOT a high-level language. I've programmed in C professionally for 27 years, mostly doing OS kernel, device driver, and network stack work. Aside from the difference in runtime performance, I am hard-pressed to think of any specific function I've ever written in C that couldn't be expressed just as easily or even more so in Python. Obviously you can't write kernel, driver, or network stack code for most kernels in Python, but that's not due to any failings of the expressiveness of Python. I'm occasionally asked what my favorite programming language is, and I don't have a good answer, other than that in general I prefer languages with type safety and memory safety. I like Java somewhat, and I like Ada even more (recent versions have fixed most of the deficiencies of the original Ada '83 standard). I like Modula 3 (which is much different than Modula 2), but have never had much opportunity to use it. I'd like to learn Haskell, and perhaps OCaml, but don't have the time to invest. More than 95% of my work is in C, because that's what my clients demand, so people are usually surprised to hear my opinion that C is a terrible choice for almost anything. I agree, except that I don't believe there is actually such a thing as "Software Engineering" yet, even though I've held jobs with the title "Software Engineer".