Tony Smith wrote:
> If the slower product has less bugs and better support, then yeah.
> But that's irrelevant, of course you pick the faster one if
> everything thing else is equal.  And buy a new PC to run it on.

It's funny how when someone refutes one statement you make you simply switch
to a orthagonal argument.

Let's keep in focus that your original statment was:

  "No-one needs the 'power' that C gives you these days, it's
  all libraries, web apps and front-ends for SQL databases.
  You don't need C for that."

Looking at that in hindsight it was apparently just trolling.

> Reminds that Olin mentions he had to write a program that took a long
> time to do a lot of complicated stuff, but never actually mentioned
> what he wrote it in.  Pascal?  ADA?  GWBasic?

I wrote it in Pascal, which gets translated to C as part of the build
process, then compiled with the MSVC compiler for PCs.

> More than one company went broke waiting for the assembler
> programmers to finish while the HLL (even C counts there) guys beat
> them to the market. Fast doesn't matter much anymore unless it's fast
> to market.  Some people want their stuff to actually work too, which
> is rather novel.

But low unit cost certainly does matter.  I've got a high volume project
that needs to be cheap, cheap, cheap.  This thing has to periodically send a
RF message that includes its 32 bit ID, a few status bits, and a CRC
checksum.  It also has to send a signature via IR, handle a user button and
a LED, compute life left and display it on the LED when asked, and a
proprietary wrinkle or two I don't want to get into.  This runs on a 10F202
using all 24 bytes of RAM, although a few bits here and there are not used.
Stuff that in your C compiler and see what you'd get.  No product because it
costs to much, I suspect.


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