Stop comparing programming languages
- Python is versatile
- JavaScript is powerful
- Ruby is elegant
- C is essential
- C++
- Java is robust
Mfw Rustaceans don’t exist :(
Also, JavaScript…why are you the way you are? Does anyone have advice for learning it so it makes sense? I can’t even get tutorial projects to run properly…
Can it even make sense tho? To me JS is an example of a not too good thing that people started too eagerly so now they’re trying to make it make sense.
I have no idea.
Start simple.
And that probably requires not going with a tutorial. Because the JS ecosystem scorns at “simple”. Just make some HTML scaffold and use MDN to understand the DOM.
use typescript and don’t look too hard at the infrastructure
I tried, but the infrastructure collapsed on me.
Lol any
Last company I worked at used Typescript, but used
anyfor everything… I have no idea why. I never got an actual answer.Because they didn’t want to train their JS developers and didn’t want to cause friction for new projects. They get to say they’re using TS, with basically none of the real advantages. (Apart from general rational error checking.)
This meme is older than rust.
actually it says 8h meaning it’s only 8 hours old
It will be 8 hours old forever.
Forever young…
I like Douglas Crockford’s talks about the “good parts” of JavaScript. They’re old and probably a bit outdated, but he explain quite well the history and why JavaScript is the way like it is.
It clicked for me when I saw them the first time. Still hate JavaScript though.
What Crockford did was enable a lot of devs to realize there was a viable development platform built into the most prolific and open network client in the world. For that he should be commended but it should have never been taken as “this is a viable general purpose language”.
He also showed that JavaScript has more resemblance to functional programming languages rather than object oriented ones. If you try to treat it as an object oriented language like Java (like the seem to imply), you will have a bad time.
This has changed with TypeScript though.
The mantra that got me through JavaScript was “almost nothing we do here is able to be synchronous”.
Everything about the language makes more sense, with that context.
C is powerful. Javascript is a husky midwestern gal at a Chinese buffet.
C is the one you want to marry, but JavaScript answers all of your drunk texts.
JavaScript is powerful
Old joke (yes, you can tell):
“JavaScript: You shoot yourself in the foot. If using Netscape, your arm falls off. If using Internet Explorer, your head explodes.”
Tea? i saw it once in a wikipedia article.
C++ is… I got nothing.
C++ is inferior to Rust and should be used in no new projects unless it is absolutely necessary
I believe the trade-offs make Rust the best option to replace C++. Now, i’m not sure about Zig replacing C yet…
There is another That you might say is a little rusty
This meme only works if you don’t include any example that is better than others in every regard.
I keep seeing people talk about Rust, and to be honest I never thought much about it because I’ve never had a reason to use it.
But when so many people in a programmer meme sub are saying “actually no joke Rust is amazing” that makes me pay attention.
So I looked into it and found this: https://github.blog/2023-08-30-why-rust-is-the-most-admired-language-among-developers/
C++ is all of those, provided you pick any 10% of it.
You’re not supposed to cast every spell in the evil grimoire.
Well, except “robust”, unless you have very strict code standards, review processes, and static analysis.
(And arguably it’s never elegant, though that’s almost purely a matter of taste.)
When the standard for “robust” is Java–
I see where you’re coming from, but no matter how many null pointer exceptions there are in Java code, you’re almost always protected from actually wrecking your system in an unrecoverable way; usually the program will just crash, and even provide a relatively helpful error message. The JVM is effectively a safety net, albeit an imperfect one. Whereas in C++, the closest thing you have to a safety net, i.e. something to guarantee that invalid memory usage crashes your program rather than corrupting its own or another process’s memory, is segfaults, which are merely a nicety provided by common hardware, not required by the language or provided by the compiler. Even then, with modern compiler implementations, undefined behavior can cause an effectively unlimited amount of “bad stuff” even on hardware that supports segfaults.
Additionally, most languages with managed runtimes that existed when Java was introduced didn’t actually have a static type system. In particular, Perl was very popular, and its type system is…uh…well, let’s just say it gives JavaScript some serious competition.
That said, despite this grain of truth in the statement, I think the perception that Java is comparatively robust is primarily due to Java’s intense marketing (particularly in its early years), which strongly pushed the idea that Java is an “enterprise” language, whatever that means.
C++ is a surprise CVE generator.
- C++ is fine
- Python is fine
- C# is fine
- PHP is fine
- JavaScript is fine
- C is fine
- Java is fine
I could go on
A true programmer
PHP is fine
i will fine you
JavaScript is also not fine.
C++ apparently has a lot of footguns if you use too many parts of it. C and orthodox C++ are fine.
people say this but C is significantly more batshit than javascript
oh you used
scanf? one of the basic functions of our language? sorry that’s got a buffer overflow vulnerability so now your application is compromisedYeah, but as far as I understand that’s not a C vulnerability. It wasn’t added. C just exposes how the underlying CPU works.
If you could avoid exposing dangerous memory quirks but still retain the same power… well, you’d have invented Rust. Rust is a better language than C, I agree with that.
Edit: Yep, just double checked. Buffers live in physical memory and have to be finite, so if you advance outside of them you’ll go somewhere else. Scanf’s not special, this is just another inherent pointer issue.
What’s the point of having a function in the standard library if the universal recommendation is to never use it?
Is that the recommendation? This is the first time I’ve actually seen it discussed.
I’m wondering at this point if a new, different stdlib would be better. Or just use Rust.
To be honest, my comment probably applies more to
gets, but the point is the same.
exposing the machinations of the underlying CPU with no regard for safety is like, the definition of a footgun
Okay, but how do you code on a CPU without directly interfacing the CPU at some point? Python and JavaScript both rely on things written in mid-level languages. There’s a difference between a bad tool and one that just has limitations inherent to the technology.
Like, to echo the meme a bit, it’s not a totally straight comparison. They have different roles.
a footgun isn’t inherently bad, it just implies a significant amount of risk
yes, if you need the ability to code on a low level, maybe C is necessary, but the times where that is actually necessary is smol
also rust
Go on…
Don’t give them ideas
What is C essential for anymore these days? Genuine question btw.
I thought C++ was essential for microprocessor control, but that it depends and sometimes I gather people use C instead, but not always.
Use the language that the company hires you to know:-).
This is a really good post about why C is so difficult to seriously consider replacing, or even to avoid by using a different language for certain projects: https://faultlore.com/blah/c-isnt-a-language/
It isn’t just a language, but it is a language - as it eventually gets around to saying, but it starts off by saying that it isn’t, then later corrects itself to say that it is, etc. I feel like the focus of this ignores the historical context of what C was written to be for - at the time there was like Assembly, BASIC, Fortran (?), other long-dead languages like was it A and/or A* or whatever, there was a B language too! (developed by Bell Labs, if Google can be trusted these days), etc. - and C was developed to be better than those. So saying that like it lacks type conversions is very much missing the point - those were not invented yet. A lawn mower also lacks those, but it’s okay bc it doesn’t need them:-) I am probably nit-picking far too many points, I suppose to illustrate that the style of the article became a hindrance to me to read it b/c of those reasons. But thank you for sharing regardless.
I don’t really like the title either, but the article does demonstrate how unfortunate it is that we’re effectively locked in to using the ABI at some level of nearly every piece of software.
That said, there definitely were languages with better type systems prior to the invention of C. Pascal is a frequently-cited example.
Oh wow, good points!:-)
Used to be embedded systems mostly. Microwaves and the like. Although with the advance of the smart home I don’t know I’d that’s still true.
The majority of microwaves, fridges, etc. Still don’t connect to WiFi. It’s mostly the high end ones which do.
The thing with C is that it’s almost always going to be the fastest high-ish level language and it has an extremely stable ABI. Self contained code written 30 years ago will likely compile with only minor (and sometimes no) tweaks today. You’re lucky to go 3 years on C++ without something fairly big breaking due to changes in the underlying language and ABI.
That’s the kind of insight I was hoping for, thanks for sharing!
C is also just a fun language to code in. You know, aside from pointers ofc:-). Though I have never done more than dabble around personally.
any sort of FFI on a modern OS will need to be done through C
Most of the Linux kernel is written in C
Pretty much all of the command line coreutils programs I use daily are in C; cd, ls, pwd, touch, rm, etc. If I want to write some small utility I’ll usually reach for a scripting language first like bash python ruby etc, but if it needs to be small and fast I’ll use C instead.
Genuine question: if you’re writing a new CLI utility, why not Rust? This is arguably where Rust has most excelled, most famously with ripgrep.
I don’t have anything against Rust, I’m just not very familiar with it
I do embedded. Its all C. You can’t replace it.
Inertia is a mofo. I did embedded programming for industrial automation almost thirty years ago, building upon and expanding an existing nightmare of C code… and I bet there’s still some of mine running something out there to this day.
You can’t replace it.
Zig?
Or Nim?
Wait, that’s like C with
extrafewer stepsAnd I think they rewrote a bunch of C libraries in order to have a better cross-platform compiler for C and zig. Or something along those lines
-
Python is
NameError: name 'term_to_describe_python' is not defined -
JavaScript is
[object Object] -
Ruby is
TypeError: Int can't be coerced into String -
C is
segmentation fault -
C++
-
Java is
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException: Cannot read the termToDescribeJava because is null at ThrowNullExcep.main(ThrowNullExcep.java:7) Exec.main(ThrowNullExcep.java:7)- CSS j ust # sucks
- <HTML />
- Kotlin is
type inference failed. The value of the type parameter K should be mentioned in input types - Go is
unused variable - Rust is
Compiling term v0.1.0 (/home/james/projects/Term)
C++ is std::__cxx11::list<std::__shared_ptr<table, (__gnu_cxx::_Lock_policy)0>, std::allocator<std::__shared_ptr<table, (__gnu_cxx::_Lock_policy)0> > >::erase(std::_List_const_iterator<std::__shared_ptr<table, (__gnu_cxx::_Lock_policy)0> >) /usr/include/c++/12/bits/list.tcc:158
I once forgot to put curly braces around the thing I was adding into a hashmap. If I remember correctly it was like ~300 lines of error code, non of which said “Wrong shit inside the function call ma dude”.
The only reason to use AI in programming is to simplify C++ error messages.
If you’re naming variables like that in Java you should definitely switch to C.
fixed ive using rust for a while
Rust is downloading 1546 dependencies
I’ll happily download 63928 depends so long as it continues to work. And it does, unlike python projects that also download 2352 depends but in the process brick every other python program on your system
Good for you. Not all of us have terabytes of free space on our computers.
If you’re not using a venv for python development, that’s kind of on you
Venv is the way
Crates aren’t exactly runtime dependencies, so i think that’s fine as long as the 1500+ dependencies actually help prevent reinventing the wheel 1500+ times
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C++ is focused on getting a strong degree of root control over the hardware of lots of systems. Which is part of why it’s difficult.
I mean, if you’re talking about CVEs permitting attackers to get control of the hardware of lots of systems, then yes, I agree
Only a part. A lot of the complexity is completely unnecessary.
Sorry, Undefined Behavior Everywhere was yelling way too loud to hear you clearly.
Were you talking about strong controlling anything with C++?
- Rust has safety and efficiency close to C
- Perl is processing most of your healthcare records
- Ada is doing space stuff
- Go is going places
What happens if I run paint splatters through OCR? Hmmmmm that random output looks like Perl. Holy shit it is Perl!
This actually happening is one reason I love the internet.
Perl? Nah, in this country its vb6, C#, java, gupta/centura and javascript :')
Source: been working for multiple healthcare market leaders in this country for 5 years now
C++ EXISTS
Stop comparing tools
- Hammer is heavy
- Wrench is elegant
- Saw is versatile
- Screwdriver
- Drill is exciting
such pointless
