Language of choice

In 2002, in comp.arch, I replied to two language advocates. One was advocating C, using the argument that "You can't do that in anything but C because C is the only language which satisfies all my criteria." The other advocate used a dubious benchmark to "show" that Scheme may be better, at least for certain problems.

My argument used existance proofs to show that C is not the only language being used to solve problems, therefore the C advocate's argument is fallacious. I simply dismissed the benchmark argument on the grounds that it uses a benchmark instead of a real problem.

Interestingly, the point that appeared to silence the C advocate was money. I quoted a figure (given by Kent Pitman in comp.lang.lisp last year) for the total cost of each ANSI Common Lisp meeting. Money like that doesn't come out of nowhere. There has to be a serious value to the language, which the C advocate doubted could exist. Well, I guess he couldn't argue with a concrete value expressed in US dollars.

You can read the comp.arch "language of choice" thread yourself, if interested, using Google. You'll find the advocacy nonsense right at the end, where it belongs.