Subj : Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
To   : Nightfox
From : tenser
Date : Mon Jan 08 2024 16:06:42

On 07 Jan 2024 at 02:04p, Nightfox pondered and said...
 
 Ni>   Re: Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
 Ni>   By: tenser to poindexter FORTRAN on Mon Jan 08 2024 03:51 am
 Ni> 
 Ni>  te> Honestly, at this point, I can't think of a good reason to teach C at
 Ni>  te> collegiate level.  Intro classes should arguably be in a functional
 Ni>  te> language of some kind; I like Scheme, but Racket would be better; bar
 Ni>  te> that, OCaml or even SML would work well.
 Ni> 
 Ni> I haven't heard of Scheme, Racket, OCaml or SML..  Are those fairly new
 Ni> languages?

Hmm, not really.  The two newest are Racket and OCaml, which
date from 1995 and 1996, respectively.  Scheme and SML are
from the 70s and 80s, respectively.  Racket and Scheme are both
dialects of Lisp, and are closely related; OCaml and SML are
from the ML family of languages, and also closely related.

 Ni> I think one of the reasons for teaching C (or C++), at least
 Ni> at the time, was that those languages were in fairly wide use in the
 Ni> industry.  I've been hearing they're being used less, but at the same
 Ni> time, they're still fairly popular languages due to the amount of older
 Ni> code in existence. And I've heard C is especially popular for embedded
 Ni> software.

They're still used quite a bit, but with memory safety
coming up as a big issue, and for that matter with the
US government starting to introduce legislation to limit
the use of memory unsafe languages in government, their
use is likely to decline faster (at least as usually
written).

(And yes, Congress has recently introduced a bill
directing the DoD to come up with a plan to limit the
use of memory unsafe languages like C and C++.)

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
 * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

.