Re:The Makefile I use with JavaScript projects
by jrimbault on Wednesday February 28, 2018 @04:49PM
(#16487381)
To be fair with myself I was mostly snarking around op comment who dismissed the C language as if it was some ancient relic.
But even without accounting for compiler optimizations and cpu architecture, the C language just straight up lies to its user. You could code something entirely with void*.
PS: what I meant by "real words" is that you're naming functions and calling them by their name. Which in itself is very powerful.
C became popular because Unix became popular, and when designing a language that intends to become popular one aims for a ratio of 10% novelty and 90% familiarity. Like, ever wonder why Javascript's date format numbers the months starting from zero and the days starting from one? It's because Eich was told to make JS as much like Java as he could, and java.util.Date numbers the months from zero and the days from one, which Java itself got from C's time.h. (Not coincidentally, Java and JS are both in the C-like language family.)
> You're writing real words
In C? Not compared to ALGOL, COBOL, Pascal, and Ada, you're not. :)
> the computers does the things you tell it to. To the letter.
As long as you're not using a modern compiler, whose optimizations will gleefully translate your code into whatever operations it pleases. And even if one were to bypass C and write assembly code manually, that still doesn't give you complete control over modern CPUs, who are free to do all sorts of opaque silliness in the background for the sake of performance.