From: John Gabriele <jmg3000@...>
Date: 2006-07-29T00:10:19+09:00
Subject: Re: For performance, write it in C - Part 2, comparing C, Ruby and Java

On 7/28/06, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb@cesmail.net> wrote:
> Peter Hickman wrote:
> [snip]
>
> Now here's where I'm going to put on my asbestos suit. I think the
> difficulty of C development is *vastly* exaggerated by the fans of
> "dynamic/scripting/interpreted" languages! [snip]
>
> So what is the source of "fear of C?"

Well, there's a number of "shoot yourself in the foot" and "C
pitfalls" type books out there which can give you a few ideas. My
guess is that, often, new C programmers get tripped up regularly on
things like:

* arrays vs. pointers, extern vs. static, and other possibly tricky
spots in the language,
* build issues, like dealing with cryptic makefiles and gcc args (ex.
passing in -lfoo args in the right order),
* discipline with conventions on memory management

But I agree with you that it's not so bad if you use it for what it's
good at. Maybe what's happened is, folks have a bad taste in their
mouth from trying to use C to write end-user apps, when it's really
best at lower-level libs, drivers, and number crunching.

---John