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Re:Java garbage collection can be really slow by Roboprog on Saturday April 23, 2016 @02:44PM (#11556804)
Yeah, when C displaced Pascal in CS programs (mid to late 80s?), it felt like an uncomfortable step backward even then.

Why were we programming in (little more than) assembler as our main language???

Re:Java garbage collection can be really slow by pjmlp on Saturday April 23, 2016 @03:03PM (#11556937)
Mid to late 90's in Portugal.

When I came to learn C, I was already quite an expert in Turbo Pascal, version 6.0 by then.

Comparing C to Turbo Pascal 6.0 in terms of features and safety just felt like "meh!".

Thankfully I got someone that around the same time gave me a copy of Turbo C++ 1.0 and I learned how to get some of the Turbo Pascal features back, while having the C portability and joined the C++ ranks for a few years.

Re:Java garbage collection can be really slow by Roboprog on Saturday April 23, 2016 @03:54PM (#11557145)
Similar experience. I picked up a copy of TP 5.5 and finally had an easier way to build my "ADT"s (abstract data type library type code).

THEN, I got a copy of TC++ a few months or a year later. WTF?!?

The light came on when I read Scott Meyer's "Effective C++" book in 96 or so. "Effective" meant "not stepping on one of 50 or so common land mines". I realized what a bad joke C++ was, and decided never to go back to it.

C is useful as a substitute for assembler, but not most applications. Too bad we didn't get to see more of Smalltalk in school in the 80s. And maybe Scheme instead of just a little bit of Lisp.