Algol vs Fortran was RE: VHDL vs Verilog

[Patrick Finnegan]

On Tuesday 09 February 2010, Dave McGuire wrote:
> On Feb 8, 2010, at 7:32 PM, N0body H0me wrote:
> >>> Here, here.  The thing that impressed me about FORTRAN (well, as
> >>> as science major, anyway) was that it could do complex numbers as
> >>> a *NATIVE* datatype!!  Now, I know for you OOP and C++ guys,
> >>> custom, exotic datatypes are a dime a dozen. But in 1980, I was
> >>> sure glad I could do complex math without all of the extra
> >>> baggage that would have been necessary if I had to use, say,
> >>> BASIC-Plus.
> >>
> >>    Yeah, but how often do those C++ custom exotic datatypes map to
> >> real datatypes supported by the hardware?  (in other words, which
> >> ones will actually be FAST?)
> >
> > That's certainly an issue.  I wonder how many applications are
> > slower and more overweight due to their being crafted with OOP than
> > they would be if they were coded using more traditional methods.
> 
>    "More traditional methods"?  Just "the way processors execute
> code" would be a good start.  Processors aren't object-oriented in
> nature.  This is one of the reasons why we have computers with multi-
> GHz processors that barely get out of their own way.  The constructs
> commonly used in OO programming don't come anywhere close to mapping
> to hardware efficiently.

But, isn't the point of programming languages to make it easier for the 
programmer to create programs?  Computers are fast; people are slow.

Have you ever tried writing code against GTK (not-quite-OOP jammed into 
C) vs Qt (real OOP using C++)?  GTK is such a pile of sh*t to try to 
write code for, in my opinion.

Now, I'm not saying that I appreciate OOP in every case, but it seems to 
be darn useful when writing GUI-based applications.  Oh, and don't 
forget that most of the code on running your favorite Mac was written in 
Objective C...
  
Pat
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