27 Sep
2014
27 Sep
'14
2:36 p.m.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_law
On Sat, Sep 27, 2014 at 12:29 PM, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
--
Lee Courtney
+1-650-704-3934 cell
Perhaps at
some point customers will actually start to recognize the
merits of programming in a high-level language, rather than C which is
just portable assembly language, but that doesn't seem to have happened
yet. I thought the Heartbleed bug might move us in that direction, but
it hasn't.
C is not completely portable. FORTRAN was described as being as portable
as syphilis.
C is not quite an assembly language. But most implementations of C will
be fairly cooperative about "get out of the way" when you do need to go
low-level.
Job's "dream team" designing the Lisa showed one example of when a high
level language is NOT an ideal solution. They clearly demonstrated many
examples where Theory and Reality don't match. Use of Pascal for writing
an OS betrays a lack of familiarity with hardware performance needs.
(Need for greater hardware performance doubles every 17 months, rendering
Moore's law a futile attempt at catching up.)
Significant components of the Lisa OS had to be rewritten in assembly
language (or in some cases, maybe just C) to get acceptable performance.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com