What Good Are C, C++, and Java?

by oskarth • 11 years ago

32 37 11 years ago

Why not making this list open source? I mean, this is not complete at all and you won't be able to fill it in all on your own. Just my 2 cents :)

Kurtz79• 11 years ago

I don't think it's meant to be a comprehensive list, just a reminder that languages that many people consider "dead" or just "old fashioned" are in reality quite pervasive and power up many of our daily tools and apps.

innguest10• 11 years ago

... because those maintaining those dinosaurs haven't died yet and are holding back the next generation of programmers.

Thanks, green-fielders, for ignoring all Programming Language research. If it weren't for you we'd be "stuck" with Smalltalk instead of Java and Lisp instead of C. So thanks (not).

joshuapants• 11 years ago

Also, does anyone know what EC2, S3, and Redshift are written in?

Well, Redshift is in C with some Python

chillingeffect• 11 years ago

One simply must admire the optimism of another who proposes to publish a list of desktop apps written in C++.

Meanwhile Javascript is "so ubiquitous that making a list seems a bit pointless."

bthrn• 11 years ago

We should also consider that a lot of popular interpreted languages -- Ruby, PHP, Python, JavaScript -- are implemented in 'boring' C/C++.

Abstraction is a beautiful thing, but we should not forget our roots!

jtreminio• 11 years ago

I recently read someone saying that there exist so many interpreted languages built on top of C because no one really wants to write C, they would rather have a language built on top of another language.

After starting to learn pure C myself, I have to agree.

nice__two• 11 years ago

This is so kindergarten-level, I have no idea why it's on HN.

BTW, Stroustrup himself has a list of applications written in C++: http://www.stroustrup.com/applications.html

oskarth• 11 years ago

I see you are new to HN. Welcome to the community!

In case you haven't seen it already, I would like to draw your attention to the HN guidelines posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Specifically the part that says Avoid gratuitous negativity. That means that your first sentence could probably be phrased in a different way, for example in terms of why you think the list of technologies isn't meaningful, or why it's a bad metric. On HN it's also generally frowned upon to complain about things being posted - if you feel it's truly off-topic, you are free to use the flagging privilege. This requires a certain amount of karma to use, though.

simplicio• 11 years ago

I can think of a lot of things to call C++, but "boring" isn't really one of them.

jahnu• 11 years ago

Established would be a better term.

swalsh2• 11 years ago

I once watched a video about languages by I believe the designer of F# (could be wrong). He talked about a graph with a horizontal axis measuring "elegance". On the right hand end is your highly elegant mostly functional languages. On the left hand side are the rugged languages like C++ very few people would call it elegant. However on the vertical axis is Utility. on the bottom are "not very useful at all", and at the top is "very useful". These languages are solidly in the upper left hand. The ultimate goal is to find something on the upper right hand side... but nothing has quite achieved it yet.

vog• 11 years ago

These [low elegance] languages are solidly in the upper left hand [high utility].

This may be the result of survivor bias. Of course there are also non-elegant languages that aren't useful, but these won't appear in such a diagram, because nobody remembers or uses them anymore.

(Exceptions may be esoteric/fun languages like Brainfuck, although these could be considered "elegant" from a certain point of view.)

nearmiss• 11 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSmkqocn0oQ

swalsh2• 11 years ago

oh cool, that's the same guy... same concept, but different video.

malkia2• 11 years ago

I really like sqlite, lua and luajit's "C" implementations.

For C++ I think Qt is pretty reasonable, also the Unreal Engine.

I'm using Java at work at the moment (Google Web Toolkit mainly, and learning it on the fly), but feeling the love in there. Some things are crazy (enums :)), others looked strange at the begining (dependency injection), but I really like the interface / class split - the interface "Set" vs the implementation "HashSet" (or something else).

innguest10• 11 years ago

Raise your hand if you've never been able to compile Qt outside of Linux.

/me raises hand

malkia2• 11 years ago

Ask me questions, I've had success building Qt from 5.0.2 to 5.3.2 for Windows - 32/64-bit with full debug info (in release too!).

yarper• 11 years ago

What Good is Green?

The following things are green;

trees grass moss apples ...

What Good Are C, C++, and Java?

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