Post by simon softnetIt's not necessary that you're feeding a troll, in my opinion.
I actually agree with the idea that C is enough.
I don't understand why you need garbage collection ... why do you need
to have garbage in the first place?
Just because time goes by does not mean everything should keep on
changing you know.
People have to understand that certain technologies can just stay as
they are, if they work well.
"need" is such a funny word. we don't need keyboards, we can just use
toggles. there have been a few other trivial improvments in the day-to-day
lives of programmers like bitmap displays, which real computer scientists can ignore.
so as time goes on, it's easy for programmers to get a whiggish view of the world.
but you're equally correct, that the mere passage of time between x and y is not
an argument that either is better.
so we're left only to argue this one on the merits of garbage collection. :-)
now that i think of it, garbage collection was invented more than a decade
before c. so the preceeding two paragraphs have been argued in the moot
court. in any event, i think one can consider manual memory management
to often be akin to manually managing registerization. there is a good chance
that in most cases that an automatic and systematic process can do a better
job than an ad hoc one.
yet, i program in c most of the time. i don't know of many operating
systems written in a automaticly gc'd language.
- erik