29 Apr
2016
29 Apr
'16
11:59 a.m.
On Fri, Apr 29, 2016 at 11:22 AM, Mouse <mouse at rodents-montreal.org> wrote:
It's not a bad or defective tool - in fact, it's a very useful and powerful
tool. But IMHO she lacks the 'situational awareness' to safely deal with
an unprotected blade going back and forth several thousand times a minute.
C is a lot like that saw - it doesn't have a lot of guards on it, and you
can do stupid things. But you can do very powerful things that are
difficult or impossible in, say, Python, which is also a very good and
useful tool.
Don't blame the tools - blame an educational system that doesn't teach
software engineering practice, but just teaches tools. "Hey, hold my beer
and watch this!" -- Ian
--
Ian S. King, MSIS, MSCS, Ph.D. Candidate
The Information School <http://ischool.uw.edu>
Dissertation: "Why the Conversation Mattered: Constructing a Sociotechnical
Narrative Through a Design Lens
Archivist, Voices From the Rwanda Tribunal <http://tribunalvoices.org>
Value Sensitive Design Research Lab <http://vsdesign.org>
University of Washington
There is an old Vulcan saying: "Only Nixon could go to China."
My gripe with
C is essentially the same as my grumbles with APL--it's
far too easy to write obscure code and not document it.
"There is not now, nor will there ever be, a language in which it's the
least bit difficult to write bad code." Not quite true, of course;
there are languages in which it's remarkably difficult to write _any_
code. But it _is_ true that there is not, nor (I believe) will there
ever be, any language in which it's substantially more difficult to
write bad code than good code. (Of course, some languages make
_certain kinds_ of bad code more difficult....)
Why it appeals to this particular foible of human
nature has always
been a mystery to me.
I doubt it's C that appeals particularly. I've done my share of
writing obscure code and not documenting it (I like to think I've
learnt better, at least somewhat, by now), and C is relevant only in
that it happens to be the language I most commonly work in. I find the
same tendency showing up in other languages, anything from sh to DSLs.
I have an end-cut saw that I've told my Spousal Unit she should not use.