notes-computer-programming-programmingLanguagesBook-programmingLanguagesChCtmLangs

Table of Contents for Programming Languages: a survey

C

Perhaps the most successful language ever.

Some people consider it as a thin portable layer over assembly. However this view is disputed (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6415240 ). One clear difference between C and assembly is that C is in the structured programming paradigm, and does not provide 'GOTO' (it does provide a facility called 'longjmp' but this is limited to jumps into functions for which there is still a valid stack frame; in addition some commentators assert that longjmp is often not implemented correctly in various C implementations (todo cite)).

Attributes:

• Low-level

Pros:

• Portable. Some commentators speculate that, of early low-level languages, C is relatively easy to write a compiler for; therefore it has been ported almost everywhere: http://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html

Cons:

• Preprocessor macros can make interop hard (cite https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6273739 )

Tutorials:

• http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/cdescent/ (partial tutorial)

People: Dennis Ritchie

Popularity:

• Popular and beloved

C++

• Backwards-compatible with C.
  • However C's longjmp interacts poorly with C++ destructors: http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/utility/program/longjmp
• A combination of performance, abstraction, and portability (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6417859 )

Attributes:

• Imperative
• Compiled
• Low-level
• OOP

Pros:

• Backwards-compatible with C.
• "You only pay for what you use"; that is, although the language does provide optional abstractions which require more time or memory overhead than C, these are always optional.

Cons:

• Big language
• Many of the most obvious ways to do things are antipatterns. Must learn best practices to avoid writing buggy code. Cite e.g. http://bartoszmilewski.com/2013/09/19/edward-chands/ , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6418165

Good for:

• low-level code (for systems programming or for performance) when more abstraction is desired than C can provide
• simulations; simulations are generally CPU-bound programs that take a long time to run and hence demand efficiency. The OOP paradigm is generally a good fit; types of domain objects are usually represented by object-oriented classes.

Best practices:

• Effective C++ (obliquely recc'd by http://bartoszmilewski.com/2013/09/19/edward-chands/)
• http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.xml

Retrospectives:

• http://www.stroustrup.com/hopl2.pdf
• http://www.stroustrup.com/dne.html The Design and Evolution of C++

People:

• Bjarne Stroustrup

Misc:

• The name makes it regrettably hard to search for on the web using some search engines.

D

Pros:

• low-level

Rust

Pros:

• low-level

Objective-C

Attributes:

• imperative
• oop

Pros:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Reference_Counting

Used in:

• iOS platform