* googles for dynamic linking and strcmp

I stand corrected. One of the first hits actually got me the algorithm:

http://althing.cs.dartmouth.edu/local/subversiveld.pdf

My primary concerns are proprietary restrictions and bloat.

Proprietary restrictions eliminate Java and C# for me.

Bloat, though better than it use to be, eliminates C++ for me.

So I chose C.

Someone mentioned that Microsoft has allot of clout and is pushing C# and I agree...best reason to avoid it. Why take on unnecessary business risk.

With Java, there is a part that they will NEVER open source and will always leave those using it open to litigation via BS patent/copyright issues. Like it or not this too introduces business risk. I remember when Java proponents said the company would NEVER sue...well they did, thus they will again in the future.

It does not make me feel any better that the judge ruled against them and for Google, as that only means they have to find the right judge. Citizen's United vs FEC has taught us, even SCOTUS can be bought and paid for (took 50+ years) like politicians of all current political parties (100+ years). Thus innovation gets stifled by the company with the biggest war chest to litigate.

There was a reason that the early car companies created an entity that controlled ALL of their patents, thus none of them sued the other for BS minor variations of a new patent.

Is it just me or does anyone else feel, how dare they bring a lawsuit to begin with...good reason to stop using any and all of their products. So many laws would never get proposed if those introducing them knew they would be removed from office for daring to consider introducing them. All the BS terrorist, DRM and anti net neutrality legislation over the last decade (or two) comes to mind. However some refuse to connect the dots, so back to programming language preferences.

Bloat is the real killer. I can run more than a dozen Linux (distros) Operating Systems in ONLY 128MB of RAM. Even have an old server running the full LAMP stack, with ONLY 256MB of RAM. Good practice to develop apps in a restricted memory environment.

I don't want my environment to require excess memory in order for my apps to run. As this will restrict the number of devices that my apps will run one.

If the OS will run in 128MB or 256MB of RAM an embedded smart device that ONLY has 512MB of RAM will run apps very fast. If the device has more than 512MB of RAM, great, more memory for the apps. Even if an embedded device had 16GB of RAM memory, I would want the OS to use 256MB or less.

I love OO programming, however no OO language will ever be faster than good ole regular C programming language. They get closer all the time and the difference most consider minor, but where it counts, C is the solution.

Not really related to C vs C++, however I want my web apps to run whether I am connected to the Internet or not...HTML5 is showing much promise in this area. Imagine an embedded device that will let you run all the applications that run with/in Python, Ruby, PHP the first day its released. Such is the possibility with a rootable (admin access) embedded device. Does any other operating system besides Linux offer this level of innovation? Where not talking only hundreds or thousands of apps, but multiple thousands of applications available to a new device day one simply because it is open and rootable.

A sign of a truly smart device, that it runs more applications than the last version of that device, day one, without additional testing required. Simply because its open, rootable with full admin access allowing us, the customer to install what we want, when we want and run what we want. Anything less is just not smart.

With C++ there is always the temptation by a proprietary company to introduce proprietary badness in the next version, that will corrupt the language and prevent it from being utilized in some other environment. With the new version of C being considered, this MUST be the primary concern. If history has taught us nothing, its that one entity or another will get involved with the standards process to mess it up for everyone else. Lets hope that after the new C version gets released, this will NOT have happened.

Its not surprising that this proprietary badness, whatever the form, always introduces unnecessary BLOAT!

Grief! That's some serious ranting on a very wide range of topics. Some very good, some not.

I don't know that speed is really the issue with C++. The issue is the time it takes the average programmer to grok code that macho-coders write that takes full advantage of the wide range of unnecessary flexibility which C++ offers.

I don't think you have a future on a corporate software team

1 members found this post helpful.

I work for a well known company and I know both C++ and Java are used here (for my work, it's C++).

You think. Your response made me smile! Been on them, supported them, led them and managed them.

Been there done that, have the coffee mugs, T-Shirts and multiple 5 year paperweight gifts to prove it...

We use Java at my job. The language, like all others, has good parts and bad parts. It has a somewhat worse reputation on discussion boards like this than I think it deserves, but it's not great either. If you're going to work on the Java Virtual Machine, I think there all the interesting projects are not actually Java:

Scala - statically typed, operator overloading, type inference (not weak typing, just type inference similar to the "auto" keyword in C++11), easy language syntax for XML, case matching on steroids (about equivalent to pattern matching in Haskell, if you're familiar with that language). scala-lang.org
Clojure - a LISP dialect on the JVM
Groovy - dynamic Java. This takes most of the things that bug experienced Java developers and fixes them, without really fundamentally changing the language.
JRuby - Ruby on the JVM.
Jython - Python on the JVM.

Of the five, only Scala is statically typed. Some people think that's important, so I figured I would mention it.

I think you misstate the situation slightly, but I think your argument is still fundamentally correct. I prefer to use a fully open language that is not cluttered with any proprietary legacy that might come back to haunt it. I get paid to use Java, and with my resume the way it is today if I tried to switch languages I would have to take a 30% pay cut. That's not going to happen, so I'm stuck with Java.

But if I could start from scratch, I would go for something else. In the established languages I actually really like the attitude of the Perl community - very focused on learning, very enthusiastic, extremely practical. For newbie languages that are trying to solve some of the problems their designers see in C and C++, I've looked at D ( http://dlang.org/ ) , Go ( http://golang.org/ ), and Rust ( http://www.rust-lang.org/ ). But of course no big corporation is going to adapt a language with a tiny share of the industry, for fear that the language stops being maintained. So any code I wrote in those languages will be at home, at least for the next few years.

1 members found this post helpful.

I like your thread, and wondered if anyone had observed any of the Programming Paradyms lectures by Jerry Cain http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps8jOj7diA0 . I swerved into telecomm, front end processors, and corporate networks, after a mildly daunting experience or two with PASCAL. The lecture series, CLASS 107 addresses a few of the topics brought forth herein. Just enough of a tease for me to jump back into some "book-learnin' "

Huh?

Corporate software is developed around databases and algorithms. Eg. Algo trading, fast access databases, embedded electronics etc.

I my perception, this would point to C++ but are there any verified stats?

Front ends may be mostly spreadsheets and browser.

REMEMBER: Corporate software lets in the suits.

OK

There are no verified stats, no.

Also, I am well aware that a Java web framework (such as Struts) and a browser interface (which may or may not be Javascript-heavy) used to be an extremely common combination for "enterprise" software. I'm quite sure that this is still extremely common.

Shotgun, which is used by animation studios, is Ruby on Rails.