I respectfully disagree. I’ve worked on heavily numerical code in both C++ and Java. Writing horrors like (a.Multiply(a).Add(b.Multiply(b))) instead of a*a+b*b gets old after about the first five minutes. Also, I’m still waiting to meet the programmer who will make those * operators do division just to trick me, yet who writes Multiply to do multiplication as we’d all expect.
I find that file you cite very readable. It's well formatted, it's clear what the code is supposed to do etc., comments where necessary. Why do you think it's sarcasm?
Well, for one thing, it’s just code in a file. There is no obvious indication of how this code fits into the wider design of the program, because C doesn’t have much of a module/namespace system. (There are some comments right at the end that seem to be about build order dependencies, but it’s not clear to me what they are trying to achieve. I assume there is some sort of project standard that requires them.)
Next, consider the first function, xor_blocks. It appears to take about 20 lines of code just to call one of four other functions based on how many entries are in an array that was passed in. A significant proportion of the code is only there because the input arrived as a void** and a count rather than a typed array. The rest is repeating essentially the same pattern of code almost verbatim four times. It’s not clear whether the four do_N functions are completely different algorithms or just the same algorithm using defaults if there aren’t enough inputs provided. In the former case, you could express the entire function in about five or six lines in numerous other mainstream languages, most of which would just be a look-up table identifying the required functions. In the latter case, the entire 20+ line function would probably be redundant in many languages. And I see no reason another language that can express this kind of logic without the overheads shouldn’t generate code behind the scenes that is still 100% as efficient as the example.
A little further down, we start defining macros like BENCH_SIZE. When these are later used elsewhere, you can’t tell whether you’re working with a constant or a function call with side effects. (This is a big objection I have to complaints that C++ overloaded operators could do almost anything, coming from people who then argue that we should use C instead because everything is explicit.)
That brings us to the second big function, do_xor_speed, in which we again encounter our ambiguous struct containing function pointers and void* parameters. This time, we also use a magic number, rely on (presumably) a global variable and implicit side effects for the main loop control logic, apparently try very hard not to let that loop be optimised in some unspecified way, and cause various implicit side effects on some other (I assume) global variable.
The final major function, calibrate_xor_blocks, has similar issues, and further complicates things by interweaving local macro definitions that mean some of the code isn’t executed, or is executed but is immediately overridden anyway, as well as apparently obfuscating a simple function call behind another macro with a name that looks like a regular function itself.
Now, I do realise that a lot of this is how a lot of industrial C gets written in practice. I also realise that there are few realistic choices for a low-level, systems programming language today, and none that I know of has much better readability than C. But that doesn’t negate the criticism that the C code has fairly horrible readability/maintainability properties compared to what could be achieved in a more expressive language.
C is and will always will be more efficient with hardware than C++ (for equally skilled programmers).
Why would you say that?
There’s always been a great deal of emphasis in C++ on not paying any performance penalty for features you’re not using. Using the roughly common subset of the languages should yield similar results either way.
As far as the extra features in C++, I don’t see any reason to assume that (for example) a virtual function dispatch via a vtable in C++ should be less efficient than the old “look up a pointer in a jump table” techniques in C that serve a similar purpose. If anything, it should be the other way around, as the C++ compiler has a little more semantic information that it could potentially use to optimise the generated code for each target hardware platform.
True, but those few people who use C++ correctly seem to have learned their lessons with C.
That may be, at least in part, because many of the less than ideal aspects of C++ come from its C heritage.
I don’t understand some of the arguments made against C++ by certain “elder statesmen” of the OSS world. It seems they don’t like some of the extra functionality available in C++, seeing it as overcomplicated or too readily able to hide behaviour. In itself, that’s a reasonable concern. But then they use C, and reinvent the same wheels using crude text substitution macros that could be doing or interacting with anything.
On another forum discussion a few days ago, I saw someone argue that the Linux kernel is very readable, citing this C file as an example. I’m still not sure whether their comment was meant to be sarcasm.
And it makes sense, why would someone not want to join a site where all your friends are?
I prefer to spend time together with my friends and family in real life. Some of them I see often, and we don't always talk about big news. For those I see less often, I enjoy catching up with when we can, and that gives us interesting things to talk about if we're going to be spending a few days together.
I am well known among my social group as a Facebook skeptic and privacy advocate, but I just don't see how meaningful relationships can be maintained with a couple of impersonal "sentences" of text speak, the occasional cat photo, and dutifully typing "Happy birthday!" each time a little box pops up telling me to. If that makes me a recluse, what should we call someone whose primary social interactions come in 140 character sound-bites and who doesn't spend much social time with others away from their PC?
From personal experience, the version of Java on Macs seems to have lagged significantly behind the version widely available on other platforms from Sun/Oracle. It's not clear to me yet exactly what this announcement/reaction refers to, but if it means clients who use Macs wind up downloading/installing up-to-date Java runtimes like everyone on other platforms, and have the latest version as a result, that sounds like a good thing.
For what it’s worth, I can see a very strong case for type-safe rendering and systematic parsing of this kind of structured data. However, to my knowledge, no mainstream statically-typed language is expressive enough out-of-the-box to represent the structure of a typical JSON/XML/whatever schema in a concise, readable, maintainable form to support these goals.
Many popular statically-typed languages support all the basic arithmetic and logical operations for numeric and boolean data. Their standard libraries often include a bewildering array of additional mathematical functions as well. However, the basic text operations of rendering and parsing strings just don’t seem to get the same sort of support in most cases, perhaps because they are so much broader in scope. Likewise, manipulating structured data is often a weak point: today’s mainstream statically-typed languages tend to lack both the general flexibility you get with dynamic typing and the expressiveness and polymorphic tricks you get with algebraic data types and pattern matching in various functional programming languages.
string formatting/regexes are about the same in java as they are in python.
I’m not sure I’d go quite that far. There are several subtle advantages in Python (and one or two not so subtle ones) that IMHO make working with formatted text significantly easier overall.
For example, Java’s basic string formatting tool, String.format, and its regex patterns rely on numerical indices to identify specific placeholders and capture groups. In Python, you can use meaningful names in each case.
Another small but often useful win for Python is having raw strings, which cut down dramatically on backslash pollution when you’re writing regex patterns.
Finally, in perhaps the fairest example of the wider statically vs. dynamically typed language comparison, we have Java’s infamous verbosity against Python’s famous readability. Simple things like matching a regex with capture groups can require several lines of code and explicit creation of several objects in Java. In Python, you rarely need more than a single call to a function in re to get the same job done.
If static languages are better, why is the bulk of web development done with dynamic languages?
I don’t know how much of that is reality and how much is popular perception. In any case, here are some general trends in mainstream statically-typed languages and mainstream dynamically-typed languages today that might contribute to the popularity of the latter for web development:
I think these are more reflections of the languages in current use and their surrounding cultures, rather than inherent traits of static vs. dynamic typing, but if we’re talking about the state of the industry today, there doesn’t seem to be any practical distinction.
Whether to do The Big Rewrite always boils down to one very simple question: do the expected gains outweigh the expected losses?
Usually, the argument against doing a rewrite boils down to two key points:
Those are certainly valid concerns, and IME it is often true that their impact is underestimated. However, what the doomsayers tend to ignore is all the potential benefits from writing a second version of something from scratch but with the experience gained from doing it once already:
I’m sure some rewrites really are just because a developer wants to write something new instead of working with what is already there, and those are almost always a bad idea IMHO. On the other hand, it can be annoying if someone comes in assuming that this is the only possible motivation for a rewrite, without considering whether there is another justification for the decision.
I'm the author of the blog post.
In that case, would you mind explaining something that is confusing me, please? It sounds like you started the rewrite in early 2005, planned to release in mid 2006, and actually had a finished product in early 2007, which isn't on schedule but is hardly unheard of for a software project. However, you then seem to jump to saying the new version wasn't available across your entire international market until 2010. What happened in between?
Well of course they will have to follow through, because you have a political system that, despite its flaws, gives representation to third parties so everyone's political views can be represented.
Not very well yet: our voting system is still transparently biased towards the larger parties, and the compromise reached by the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives in the coalition doesn't go all the way to offering the public a referendum on PR in the Commons (though they do seem to be proposing it for the elected Lords).
But I do take your point: it seems likely that the presence of the Liberal Democrats in the coalition is pushing the civil liberties agenda higher up the government priority list. I think that is partly because it is a big Lib Dem policy area anyway, but also partly because it is something where both parties in the coalition can readily agree on most issues and say they were doing what their voters asked for. Any coalition wants to show early success to reduce the scepticism in the ranks, and since the Tories and Lib Dems have well known differences in economic policy so the top issue of today can't really help both of them at the same time, this is probably the next best area to look for that success story.
I find it ironic that the US should decide to introduce this measure under a new government when the old one was notorious for abuse of authority.
Meanwhile, here in the UK, we just handed electoral annihilation to the administration that introduced a similar guilt-by-suspicion DNA system here, not long after the European level courts ruled that keeping innocent people's DNA on the database indefinitely was illegal anyway.
One of the first proposals brought up by our new coalition government, indeed one of the points where both parties agreed on almost everything despite their general political differences, was a "Freedom Bill". That will basically be a mass repeal of all the draconian, intrusive, guilt-assuming laws that the previous lot brought in under a climate of fear that they perpetuated more effectively from the corridors of power than any terrorist group ever could. Introducing safeguards so that innocents' DNA is removed from the database in a timely fashion will be an acid test of that bill: they've talked the talk, now will they really follow through?
Hi, I’m a real typography geek. (Chorus: “Hi, typography geek!”)
*Real* typography geeks say Knuth got everything wrong.
Sure we do. We know Knuth was crazy to talk about paragraph-based hyphenation and justification, and it is madness that the Knuth-Plass algorithm remains the gold standard in H&J today and something that only TeX itself, InDesign, and a few high-end specialist packages can match even now. We hate all those fiddly thin spaces that you have to type manually, too; we’d much rather just have our adjacent quotation marks and superscripts clashing.
Speaking of superscripts, we know Knuth’s font design skills were appalling as well. Anyone could design a system of fonts that was still clearly legible when used to typeset mathematics with sub-subscripts at 4/5pt on the one hand, yet provided extensible brackets surrounding multi-line expressions without looking overly large on the other. We know this from the vast number of font families available from the world’s leading type foundries today that do the job, and the way mathematical journals have given up on TeX because modern fonts provide a much wider range of mathematical symbols that are still clearly distinguishable from any Latin or Greek glyphs that may appear nearby.
Maybe TeX was just behind the times, though. After all, in an era when TeX could only typeset a variety of proportional fonts with intelligent hyphentation, ligatures and correct punctuation, at a useful range of sizes, in a way that could survive photocopying a research paper and still be legible, the world’s serious typographers were probably already using word processors that could render a fixed size, monospaced font on their dot matrix printer with underlining!
TeX’s handling of fonts is archaic by modern standards, of course, though updates like XeTeX do a much better job when it comes to things like OpenType and Unicode. However, in fairness, Knuth developed TeX many years ago, at a time before these modern standards were a glint in their metaphorical parents’ eyes. I think it’s rather unfair to criticise on this basis, and much of what he did has set the standard for three decades.
Getting back on topic, if the person or people behind the tool we’re discussing can do half the job for musical notation that Knuth did for mathematics, it will be a very fine achievement indeed. As with mathematics, it is relatively easy to scribble musical symbols in a way that is technically correct, but rendering music in a way that remains clear and effective even when read at speed in large volumes is quite a different thing. Nitpicking about some of the typography in an early demo seems a little unfair, given the already high standard of the overall rendering.
Sorry, I wasn't clear: I was referring to big companies in the business software world, such as Microsoft and Adobe. Certainly the games world has been suffering a rash of silly DRM-related failures recently, but alas, that sort of software is not a common sight on my work machines.
And it should be the law: If you use the word `paradigm' without knowing what the dictionary says it means, you go to jail. No exceptions. -- David Jones
