Kind: captions
Language: en
you've you've said that it's good for
any professional programmer to know at
least five languages speaking about a
variety of languages that you've taken
inspiration from and you've listed the
yours as being at least at the time C++
obviously Java Python Ruby and
JavaScript can you
first of all update that list modify it
you don't have to be constrained to just
five but can you describe what you
picked up also from each of these
languages how you see them as
inspirations for even you're working
with C++ this is a very hard question to
answer
so about languages you should know
languages I I reckon I knew about 25 or
thereabouts when I did C++ it was easy
in those days because the languages were
smaller and you didn't have to learn a
whole programming environment and such
to do it you you could learn the
language quite easily and it's good to
learn so many languages and I imagine
just like with natural language for
communication there's different
paradigms that emerge in all of them
yeah but there's commonalities and so on
so I picked five out of ahead big five
out of a hat obviously the important
thing that the number is not one that's
right it's like I don't like I mean if
you're mono clot you are likely to think
that your own cultures the only ones
pair is everybody else's a good learning
of a foreign language and a foreign
culture is important it helps you think
and be a better person with programming
languages you become a better programmer
better designer with the second language
now once you've got to the weight of
five is not that long it's the second
one that's most important and then when
I had to pick five I
sort of thinking what kinds of languages
are there well there's a really low
level stuff it's good it's actually good
to know machine code movie very still
sorry even today even today the C++
optimizer is right there a machine code
than I do
yes but I don't think I could appreciate
them if I actually didn't understand
machine code and machine architecture at
least in in my position I have to
understand a bit of it because you mess
up the cache and you're off in
performance by a factor of 100 right
shouldn't be that if you are interested
in higher performance or the size of the
computer you have to deploy so so I
would go as a simpler I used to mention
C but these days going low-level is not
actually what gives you the performance
it is to express your ideas so cleanly
that you can think about it and the
optimizer can understand what you're up
to my favourite way of optimizing these
days is to throw out the clever bits and
see if it's dawn runs fast and sometimes
it runs faster so I need the abstraction
mechanisms or something like C++ to
write compact high-performance code
there was a beautiful keynote by Jason
Turner at the CPP Khan a couple of years
ago where he decided he was going to
program pong on Motorola 6800 I think it
was and he says well this is relevant
because it looks like a microcontroller
it has specialized hardware it has not
very much memory and it's relatively
slow and so he shows in real time how he
writes pong starting with fairly
straightforward low-level stuff
improving his abstractions and what he's
doing he's writing C++ and it translate
into
in 286 assembler which you can do with
playing and you can see it in real-time
it's the compiler Explorer which you can
use on the web and then he wrote a
little program that translated 86
assembler into
Motorola has simpler and so he types and
you can see this thing in real time
while you can see it in real time and
even if you can't read the assembly code
you can just see it his code gets better
the code the assembler gets Kamala he
increases the abstraction level uses C++
11 as it were better this code gets
clean that get easier maintain the code
shrinks and it keeps shrinking and I
could not in any reasonable amount of
time write that a simpler as good as the
compiler generated from really quite
nice modern C++ and I'll go as far as to
say the the thing that looked like C was
significantly uglier and smaller when it
becames and and larger when it became
machine code so what the the
abstractions that can be optimized
important I would love to see that kind
of visualization larger code bases yeah
there might be blood a few can't show a
larger code base in a one-hour talk and
to have it fit on the screen right so
that C is if you are so my two languages
would be machine code and C++ and then I
think you can learn a lot from the
functional languages so pig has pralaya
male I don't care which I think actually
you you'll you'll learn the same lessons
of expressing especially mathematical
notions really clearly and having the
type system that's really strict and
then you should probably have a language
for sort of quickly churning out
something you could pick JavaScript you
could be Pig Python you could pick Ruby
you