Dimitri

When Java became popular, people (me included) claimed that it was massively better than C/C++. This was highly controversial and people mocked me for using Java. I was hammered by the referees during my first grant application for picking Java as my language of choice. In some ways, Java is great.. We have lots of big data software written in Java and Java-like language... Lucene, Elastic Search, and so forth. It is not at all obvious that you could just rewrite them in C and make them faster. You can, but it requires skill. If you task Joe the intern into rewriting your Java code into C, the result will almost assuredly by buggier and slower code. But the same thing happens in reverse... You can write code in Java that will give the average C/C++ system a run for its money. We have an implementation of Roaring Bitmaps in Java, and one in C. When I last benchmarked them, the Java implementation was sometimes faster... Of course, it means that the C version could and maybe should be further optimized... but it is surprisingly easy to write fast code in a higher level language... My own view is that, most of the time, you can write fast and effective software in just about any programming language. What is more important is the social component. Some programming languages attract some people and some problem areas. The Go people are not like the C# people. And the social differences are more important in practice. In some sense, if you are offered a job, and they tell you "we code in C#", they tell you a lot. It is not about the syntax or the tools primarily. It tells you what kind of philosophy they have. Ultimately, all languages s*ck. They all have annoying limitations and you eventually hit them. There is no free lunch.