Re: newbie questions about git design and features (some wrt hg)

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Jan 31, 2007, 16:41 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.63.0701311733120.22628@wbgn013.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0701310805500.3632@woody.linux-foundation.org>

Hi,

On Wed, 31 Jan 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> So yeah, C is low-level. Yeah, you have to know how "pointers" work. And 
> yeah, it takes effort especially to get started. But once you have 
> gotten started, you realize that:
> 
>  - it may have been a lot more work to get over the hump, but once you 
>    did, you can find people who can work with you and help you.
> 
>  - yeah, you didn't really want to work with people who didn't know how a 
>    "pointer to a function returning a const pointer" really works.

Probably related to the second point:

- you do _not_ want to work with people who a scared of pointers. Most 
  such people are only scared of it, because they are not _able_ to clean 
  up after themselves. This leads _invariably_ to bad code.

For example, I have never ever seen so bad code as in Java. If you are not forced by the language to clean up the data structures, you tend to get lazy. You don't free memory (why should I? It's garbage collected anyway, right?), you don't close resources, you _waste_ time by using incorrect data-types or doing wholesale copying all the time.

Just look at Eclipse's source code. *tries not to vomit on the keyboard*

All this is a real pity, because when you see Java code by a guy who learnt the ropes in C, and learnt Java properly, it is just elegant and concise. And it gives a huge development boost, because you have so much infrastructure already.

> I agree that C is a really hard language for "prototyping".

That depends. I cannot do it, I am too stupid. But I saw a guy prototyping in assembler, using his assembler library. That was _fast_!

Oh well, I try to stop rambling for today, and do something productive again.

Ciao, Dscho