[wplug] relevance of C for Apps

[John Harrold]

Sometime in October Chris Romano assaulted the keyboard and produced:

| I don't want to start a flame war or anything and this is/can be a
| loaded question, but is C still a good language for developing Apps? 
| I know for things like a kernel and very low level stuff, it is still
| the number 1 choice.  But what about apps in general?  

I could be wrong but I believe gnome is written in C.

| biggest arguments that I hear for using C is that it's fast.  With
| machines becoming faster and faster and some of the security concerns
| around C, is C++ or Java a better choice. Is C that much faster then
| C++ and Java.  

I'm not a programmer (IANAP), but I read a lot about programming. From what
i've read C# is supposed to take care a lot of the security programs
associated with C (like buffer overruns). I've also read that java
compensates for a lot of C's short comings also.

| the class.  I have used C and do use it when the need comes.  I also
| hear people talking about using a scripting language like PHP, Python
| for the front-end/GUI and C for any heavy processing.  Does anyone
| have any experiences or insight on this?  I guess in the end looking
| in the future does it seem better to use C or some other language for
| app development.

I think it's good to use things like Perl (I prefer it to PHP and know
almost nothing about Python) for prototyping concepts. I also think its
good to write the somewhat painful/tedious stuff which doesn't slow the
program down in a scripting language and use C to do the heavy lifting.
From my perspective, I do a lot of math. So I'll write something to do a
lot of linear programming using C and the cplex C callable libraries. Then
I can take that C program, wrap perl around it and let perl do the "donkey"
work (as my Indian friend likes to call it).

-- 
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