[ILUG] Which language?

[Brady, Padraig]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Smelly Pooh [mailto:plop at redbrick.dcu.ie]
> Sent: 01 September 2000 13:09
> To: ilug at linux.ie

[snip]

> > > C and C++ are very powerful and can give much greater performance and
> > > scalability on _large_ systems, but they come at the price of making 
> > > it easy to mess up big time.
> > 
> > I agree. In general the more flexible something is, necessarily
> > the more complex it is. In other words there is no free lunch.
> 
> Not necessarily, look at the RISC vs. CISC debates, even in language terms

> the most simplistic are the most flexible.  Scheme is a good example, good

> for all levels of programming, scripting and embedding, extendable via
user 
> written macros to include object orientation, loop structures, exception 
> handling and so on, with a more complex language aforementioned
infrastructure 
> might already be there, but it'd be a lot harder to adapt the language to
new 
> ideas as readily as with a simple language like Scheme.

This is not what I meant by flexible.

> I'll concede that you might be using the word flexibility to describe such
> things as being able to handle memory yourself, access low level stuff
like
> kernel APIs or inline assembly and so forth, although I consider that
control
> not flexibility.

Yep, that's what I mean. Yes control is a better word.
Lower levels give you more control for creating the logic
to manipulate bits (of data), which is all you're doing 
at the end of the day.

Padraig.