Flutterby™! : Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

The unreasonable effectiveness of C.

Seems particularly apt because I'm immersing myself in some sub-cultures of Perl right now, and it seems like there's a pathological resistance to C, but also a tendency to think that if we only build these byzantine structures around Perl we'll have a better environment. And, frankly, what most of those byzantine structures introduce seems to be noise, complexity, and intermittent failure.

Relatedly, yesterday I ran across sweet.js - scheme and rust-like macros for JavaScript, and my reaction was "wait, this doesn't solve any of the syntactic evil that's part of JavaScript, but puts in extra cognitive load when I'm trying to read stuff later".

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Perl Open Source Nature and environment hubris ]

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#Comment Re: made: 2013-01-24 14:03:20.54397-08 by: meuon

I went to an IEEE presentation yesterday by a UTC professor, talking about fuzzy logic for PI/PD feedback control of motors. He was apparently suprised when one students pure C version of the controller was much faster than one written in C# and C++. He is an electrical engineer, not a programmer, which is the other issue: It's hard to do almost anything engineering-ish without learning about code. Not how to, necessarily, but about it.