This will probably be my last post here. My understanding is once I retire I won’t be able to post here any more, and that after a year of no posting the University will shut down this blog. To anyone who may still be reading here, thanks for your attention!

I was hoping to finish my “Programming Languages I Have Known” series before retiring, but that obviously isn’t going to happen. But I’ll try to finish it on my personal blog, https://curtispew.wordpress.com/. I may be able to post more there now that I won’t be spending my time working.

(cross posted from my personal blog)

I know, it’s been a while since I’ve written anything in this series. (If you’re new here, “PLIHK” stands for “Programming Languages I Have Known”.) Part of that is that I knew the next one should be about C and C++, and I’m not really sure what to say about them. For much of the 1980’s, 1990’s, and even into the 2000’s C (and C++, which is C with object oriented extensions more or less) was kind of the most common programming language that everyone, or at least every systems-class programmer, was expected to know. C is certainly a capable language, and C++ did a lot to popularize object oriented programming. I think that, like Unix (which came from basically the same people), it’s more terse than it needs to be, and as time has shown it’s much too easy to have memory leaks, pointer errors, and such. (I will confess that I do find the C++ template system rather powerful.)

I consider knowing C and C++ to be useful, because there are situations where they are the only practical language to use. I once saw C described as “warmed-over assembly code” (or words to that effect) and that’s not as far off the truth as you might hope. Just like assembler, there are probably better alternatives for most programming tasks.