lyle_hanson's Journal: Programming Languages as they relate to my Ranting

First off, today sort of rules. It's sunny, relatively warm (wet as opposed to icy) and there's that nasty smell in the air that tells you it's warm enough for 4 months of accumulated shit to finally thaw out and decay. I love it. I should be out on a bike. Maybe later. Must code.

I spent several hours last night debugging a pretty nasty and hard to find problem in a program (for somebody on rentacoder) I've already been paid for (FINALLY!) but, in the quest for completeness/perfection/closure, I have to finish those last few features. Well, as I find happens pretty often when coding a non-trivial C program, the same few errors will always crop up and make you insane for days on end. Almost always one-liners, too. This time I was seeing some corrupted data but not always an outright segfault. And since it's a multithreaded program that just clouds my thinking further. Turns out I was free()'ing some data prematurely, and then using it later. Fuck. Still some other things to work out, but that was the killer.

I'm learning perl at the moment, and I think I'm about to make a leap in my opinion of programming languages. Anyway, up until recently I was infatuated with the low level, close-to-the-metal control that C gives me. Java's cool, C++ is cool, but it seems that I've been using C almost exclusively for projects lately. And as I start writing some perl I slap my head at the realization that this neat thing I just did in ONE LINE would have taken me 20 minutes and 60 lines in C. It doesn't help that my C style is a bit on the verbose side. Now don't get me wrong, I would have derived quite a bit of sick pleasure from getting down and dirty and building a neat C solution, but it's beginning to occur to me that getting something completed and working might be better than going for glory and having something that's always "almost done...". Not to say C doesn't have it's place, nor that I'm giving it up for other, higher level languages, but all that talk about "get it working first, optimize and make it faster when you're done", and "the last 20% always takes 80% of the time" is really starting to sink in.

So I guess it's time for another period of expanding my coding horizons. Hell, maybe I'll learn VB. Well, maybe I won't go that far.