[ale] On Programming and Programming Langauges

[Tom Freeman]

Justin

I'm quite sure that this is true of virtually any engineering field, and 
fairly sure that it is true in most technical/science fields also. Spend 
time outside your comfort zone, and learn something significant about 
your tools and self.

IMHO

On 09/17/2010 11:28 AM, Justin Simms wrote:
> Mike,
>
> Thanks for this post! There is nothing more fulfilling than reading an excellent
> summary of the strengths of learning C. I agree with you fully. I do,
> however, wish that
> more developers would be able to see that all programming languages
> add to understanding the whole
> of software engineering. Dynamic languages, strongly typed languages,
> etc..... Once we can step
> outside of the comfort zone of our "learned" language, we can then
> truly advance ourselves as engineers
> and forward thinkers. At least that is my take on things.
>
> Justin
>
> On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 11:07 AM, Michael B. Trausch<mike at trausch.us>  wrote:
>    
>> Given the C# thread and the volumes of comments that I have there---both
>> addressed and not, because of space---I thought I'd go ahead and just
>> send an email out with all my thoughts.  Whether or not this turns into
>> a thread that anyone has any interest in.  I do not expect that most
>> will care to read this, it's _quite_ long.  Oh, well.  Take the rambling
>> for what it is (or is not) worth.  :-)
>>
>> There are, of course, _many_ languages out there.  And there are a lot
>> of people out there looking to hire for projects in language X which
>> have insane requirements like "five years experience in X", which is,
>> frankly, _stupid_.  It shows that management and HR types really know
>> next to nothing when it comes to the world of programming, and a lot of
>> programmers buy into that knowledge of nothing.  Moving on, though...
>>
>> If you are a _programmer_ (regardless of what other hats you might wear,
>> such as system administrator) then you hold a lot of programming
>> knowledge that is independent of the implementation language.  For
>> example, you know algorithms, and you know where to look them up for the
>> ones that you've never used, and you're familiar with the costs and
>> benefits of them.  You know how to craft a hand-written parser for
>> simple to moderately complex data types.  You know that you have
>> metaprogramming tools available to you.  You know that a compiler isn't
>> some special magical black box, but yet another tool in the process of
>> translation, which is something that all programs ultimately wind up
>> doing (translating data from one form to another).  You are also fluent
>> in multiple _programming environments_.  And you are able to "program
>> into" them.  More on this in a minute.
>>
>> It's easy to be fluent in a language.  Seriously.  It's more difficult
>> to be fluent with the entire standard library for a language, though,
>> whether that is a class library or a function library or a hybrid of
>> both.
>>
>> Insofar as "programming into" an environment, it means that you do
>> creative things with the resources that you have.  For example, I often
>> see a lot of people say that "C isn't object-oriented".  Bull$#!t!  It
>> _absolutely_ is.  In fact, even assembler can be object oriented, if you
>> want it to be.  "Object-oriented"-ness isn't a feature of a programming
>> language that is depended upon to write programs in an object-oriented
>> manner.  Languages that support object-orientation natively have
>> provided a convenient notation for supporting that programming model,
>> and a type system that is accessible behind it, but nothing more than
>> that, really.  I mentioned GObject before, and I'll mention it again:
>> GObject is an object-oriented type system for C.  It is easy to write C
>> programs that use it, and it even supports refcount assisted memory
>> management along the lines of what you expect to see from other
>> languages.  It's more difficult to write classes in GObject, but there
>> are tools available which take the tedium out of that (for example, GOB
>> and Vala, both of which take code as input and output C-GObject code).
>>
>> GNOME is written in C.  And GNOME is heavily object-oriented.  And the
>> GObject type system is really an awesome, amazing work.  It does it all
>> without the binary mangling problems of C++, without the managed runtime
>> aspects of Python, the JVM, the CLR, or whatever, and it works well,
>> given enough time and effort put into to being fluent with that
>> particular programming environment.  And it is portable across POSIX
>> systems and even Windows to a certain degree (because of the way Windows
>> manages things like network file descriptors there can be a few caveats
>> that the programmer needs to be aware of, but it's not that awful a
>> situation, really).
>>
>> Now, there is the issue of whether or not it is useful to learn C these
>> days.  It absolutely is!  C is not a dead language, by any stretch of
>> the imagination.  Why do I think that?  Because there are a lot of
>> things about being fluent in C that provide insight to programming
>> problems in other languages.  If you can sort through the issues of
>> programming language vs. type system vs. standard library in your head
>> (they really are all separate things!) then you can gain the insight
>> that C has to offer from a programming perspective.  There was once a
>> time when it was necessary to program in C for everything.  Do I think
>> that we should return to that?  Hell, no.  There are one-off things that
>> I use HLLs like Python for, and I wouldn't want to write those sorts of
>> things in C.  But the things that I do write in C are things that are
>> not one-off programs; that is, things that I deploy in multiple
>> environments.  And writing cross-platform C code, as I've mentioned
>> before, isn't as difficult as a lot of people seem to think it is.
>>
>> I learned a lot of programming languages before I learned C.  BASIC (in
>> the forms of BASICA, GW-BASIC, QuickBASIC, and Visual Basic), 6502
>> assembler, some x86 assembler---the BASIC family and PHP were the ones
>> that I used the most.  And honestly, I think that was detrimental to my
>> way of thinking.  You see, while BASIC is a general-purpose language
>> ("Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code", wow, I still
>> remember that?), it does not expose a lot of the system's underlying
>> functionality in the way that C does.  It cannot, in fact, because BASIC
>> requires certain built-in statements (PRINT, INPUT, and so forth) that
>> are part of the core language itself.  This coupling of the language to
>> things that ought to be explicit function calls in the language's
>> runtime makes it difficult to use for "all purposes".
>>
>> After I learned the many variants of BASIC and then PHP, I spent a fair
>> amount of time avoiding C.  People told me that it was pointless to
>> learn, that it was arcane, that it was a dead/dying language, that it
>> was a waste of time.  And so I avoided it.  At some point, I had a
>> problem, and I don't even remember what that problem was now, but it was
>> a problem with a program that was written in C.  And I went looking
>> through it, and because C is so bloody different from BASIC and PHP I
>> was utterly confused.  Now, I'd been programming in PHP for quite some
>> time at this point, and I was fully used to the ideas of weak type
>> systems.  At first, I saw C's relatively strict data typing as a
>> hindrance to productivity.  How wrong was I!  It's something that I wish
>> PHP would implement, it would reduce bugs caused by implicit coercion
>> that I see in every PHP project I am paid to work on.
>>
>> Sorry, I digress a lot.
>>
>> In any event, I had to learn C, and I was able to fix my problem.  And
>> then I put it off, and I didn't write anything in it because I had no
>> need to.  But as time went on, I kept coming back to learn C.  And the
>> standard library, and so forth.  I learned these so that I could
>> (mostly) fix problems with things I had, or at least that was my
>> intention at the time.  But I found that the more that I learned C and
>> the standard library and all of that, the more I could appreciate its
>> simplicity and structure.  I realized that I had been thinking about
>> programming all wrong!  So I started learning more about it the whole
>> process.  I decided that if I'm going to continue to call myself a
>> programmer, I needed to really understand what the hell was going on.
>>
>> So I started learning about compilers, and interpreters, in a
>> lower-level-than-most sort of manner.  What happens when GCC is run over
>> C code?  All of us know that if you have valid C input, you get object
>> code as output, and you can link that into an executable.  How do those
>> executables play nicely together?  What about for other languages, is it
>> the same?  Turns out that C++ has non-standardized linkage while C has
>> standardized linkage and a lot of other programming environments take
>> advantage of that (too bad that PHP does not, though that is probably
>> because the bulk of PHP code out there would choke and die if it did).
>>
>> Jumping topics again, I said in the other thread somewhere that if you
>> learn C, your abilities as a programmer greatly improve.  Allow me to
>> correct and clarify on this point somewhat.  There is some indescribable
>> quality of knowledge that can be obtained from working at a low level.
>> You get a chance to see all the things that are going on, a chance to
>> understand what is _really_ happening.  When I allocate some memory in
>> C, it's pretty straightforward compared to the creation of a new
>> variable in Python, at least in terms of what's really happening under
>> the scenes.  And if you have a problem with the Python VM, you have a
>> hell of a problem debugging it because you probably (as a Python
>> programmer) do not care to understand all the internals of the Python
>> VM, you just want to get things done.  So now you're holding a ball that
>> you will need to handle---either you find someone to give the ball to,
>> and depend on them to fix it, or you start learning enough about the
>> Python VM to be able to troubleshoot what's going on and fix it.  After
>> all, all software has bugs.
>>
>> The lower-level your understanding is, though, the more that you can
>> infer.  And if you know C, you can understand other C-family languages
>> more easily.  I mentioned before that of this family there is C++, C#,
>> and Java.  Omitting the standard libraries of each, my statement is
>> factually correct.  The languages themselves have very similar rules in
>> terms of syntax and type-strength.  You have nuances that are of course
>> different, or they wouldn't be different languages.  But they are all
>> part of the same family.  PHP, OTOH, while it looks like it is a
>> C-family language at a glance, cannot be described as such.  Some of the
>> syntax is similar, but it is _very_ different in terms of how you would
>> write code for it, and the very simple fact that you can just $create a
>> variable anywhere and it's valid even if it $creates a new $Variable
>> changes the fundamental understanding that one has to have in order to
>> properly scrutinize and read a program.
>>
>> To that end, I think that everyone should at least be familiar with what
>> assembly language is, and how it works.  I don't think that everyone
>> could or should program in it, because once you get "lower" than C, you
>> have the problem that you are now tying yourself to a particular CPU
>> family, and potentially even just typing yourself to a single CPU model.
>> While that used to be something that was useful at one point in time, it
>> has no payoff anymore.  You can get all the performance that you need
>> from a good C compiler, and if you need to squeeze more than that, you
>> can pay someone who will write hand-optimized assembler, and you'll pay
>> out the nose through it (which I suppose will tell you just how much you
>> probably don't need to do it, since another CPU is less expensive).
>>
>> But writing code in C is _not_ as expensive as people make it out to be.
>> There is a *heavy* investment in learning.  *HEAVY*.  And you need to
>> sit yourself down and you need to find a routine that works for you in
>> terms of writing code.  There are multiple books on programming best
>> practices out there that talk about how to do things like ensure that
>> you're always keeping up on your memory allocations and whatnot.  And
>> for the most part, it is as simple as adopting a convention and
>> following it.  And if your convention is well-thought-out, you can
>> probably even write a small program that will automatically enforce it
>> for you.  You can use your version control system to run sanity checks
>> on your code, telling you when you step out of your convention.
>>
>> The real expense with C and C++ code (and in fact, with nearly any other
>> language that I can think of) comes not in the writing of it by a
>> programmer, but in the maintenance of it by a programmer when the code
>> was originally written by someone who isn't a programmer, but writes
>> programs.  There's a distinction, I think.  I know many people that can
>> write programs, but I would not call them a programmer.  You say
>> "algorithm" to them and they say "what's that?"  You say "type system"
>> to them and they again say, "what's that?"  And many of these are people
>> that can put "5 years of programming in X" on their résumé!
>>
>> I'm not saying that "real" programmers are immune to bugs and failures
>> and mistakes, but as with any field, mistakes are far less likely to
>> happen if you are aware of what causes them and head them off before
>> they can form.  If you have a brand new car and you don't want to get
>> ketchup in the seats, don't eat in the car.  If you are a C programmer
>> and you don't want to leak memory, remember to have a matching free (or
>> g_free, or struct_or_object_free) call to match every malloc (or
>> g_malloc, or struct_or_object_new) call.  You do this the same way that
>> you match your braces, and you're good to go (for the most part).  And
>> if you write library code that will be reused, and you make it easy to
>> do both, chances are that it'll get done and you won't forget.
>>
>> In any case, I've touched on every point I wanted to touch on, for now,
>> I think.  If this turns into a discussion (which I'd like very much to
>> see, but it might be too long to keep anyone's interest) then cool.
>>
>>         --- Mike
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Ale mailing list
>> Ale at ale.org
>> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
>> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>>
>>      
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>