Re:Oberon vs. C++ (1994)
by AnimalMuppet on Wednesday March 25, 2015 @04:38PM
(#9265761)
> Why? One doesn't need to take a very strict view of what "robust and reliable extensible software system" means to conclude that we do not have such systems at the moment.
No. But we do have garbage collected languages, and we still don't have robust and reliable extensible software systems. So claiming that garbage collection is going to get us there does seem naïve.
But the original claim was that garbage collection is a prerequisite - not sufficient, but necessary. I still think that's naïve. But maybe, once we figure out how to do it, then we can figure out what language elements are necessary, and then we can see if garbage collection is on the list.
My bet: Garbage collection can help, but it's not essential.
Why? One doesn't need to take a very strict view of what "robust and reliable extensible software system" means to conclude that we do not have such systems at the moment.
As to the pragmatists vs the scientists: IMO, with hardware becoming faster and faster, the scientists will eventually take over. Pragmatists will build kludges such as lint and typescript, but eventually, somebody will take a step back and decide that the world is better of if the elementary parts of such tools get included in the language and IDE (for example, nobody in his right mind writes C with implicit int's; some BSDs have banned gets)