C's syntax

[Alex Martelli]

"bowman" <bowman at news.montana.com> wrote in message
news:slrn8vb362.16c.bowman at localhost.localdomain...
> On Tue, 24 Oct 2000 12:17:24 +0200, Alex Martelli <aleaxit at yahoo.com>
wrote:
> !
> !I fully agree with Koenig (a great programmer, and a great expert
> !in C, and later C++, by the way) that "Even C experts come across
> !problems that require days of debugging to fix" (from the preface
> !of his book, cfr the URL
>
> Kernighan and Pike's book 'The Art of Programming' also mentions a variety
of
> annoying little mistakes they've made. I think it is safe to say they are
not
> C neophytes.
>
> I look at coding like skiing: if I don't fall on my face occasionally, I'm
not
> learning anything.

Then, using C is highly recommended, as its syntax and semantics
combine to guarantee lots of such learning opportunities (even if
you are a Pike, a Kernighan, or a Koenig...).

Me, I don't like skiing, and, maybe because of that, I much prefer
to program in higher-level languages where possible (I'd rather
program in Python than in C++, in C++ rather than in C, in C rather
than in Assembly, in Assembly rather than in hex machine code...).

I'm "field-provenly" very productive in low-level languages (and
well understand the perverse kind of pleasure achieving something
in them can provide -- much like, say, the self-constraints one
chooses to impose on oneself when writing a sonnet, rather than
free verse...:-), but higher-level languages such as Python raise
my productivity a lot -- and, hey, ars longa, vita brevis... I
can't justify the extra time spent fighting a programming language
(and the traps & pitfalls it lays for me) when I could be happily
productive in Python...!-)


I still manage occasional 'falls on my face' anyway (cfr the
forgotten comma-after-print that was noticed in one of my posts:-)
without having to go around _looking_ for them...:-).


Alex