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Comment: Re:Perl (Score 1) 532

In some languages you can create your own types. So you can have a variable A that is type meters and B of type feet. If you try to assign A to B or vice versa without explicitly typecasting (letting the compiler know you intended to do this, which comes in handy in conversion functions), the compiler will produce an error. It's a safety mechanism. You're not forced to use this feature but if you do it can help.

Comment: Re:Perl (Score 2, Insightful) 532

You can have all the innovation you want, but innovation isn't enhanced by allowing you to confuse meters with feet or by allowing you to divide by zero. Certain thing should always be forbidden if they can be detected by the compiler and the compiler can be helped by language rules amenable to correctness. This doesn't limit innovation it just minimizes obvious (or not) flaws.

Comment: What makes a language good? (Score 1) 435

by darkwing_bmf (#46880807) Attached to: C++ and the STL 12 Years Later: What Do You Think Now?

What makes a language good? I'd argue that most will let you do what you want. And you may be proficient in any given language. But what makes one language better than another is the following.

When you are given someone else's unintentionally screwed up code, is the language easy to understand so that you can find the bug(s) in a reasonable amount of time? Does the language disallow questionable code so that the other guy is less likely to screw up in the first place?

I'm fairly certain that if I'm the only person working on a project C++ would be great. Not my first choice but not bad by any stretch. But if I have to debug someone else's code, C++ would not be fun.

If this is timesharing, give me my share right now.