[rescue] Mozilla Firefox

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Thu, 22 Apr 2004 @ 13:21 -0400, Dave McGuire said:

> People who can't manage their own memory or handle pointers simply 
> shouldn't be trying to program computers.

I agree with you, in principle anyway.

To play Devils Advocate though:

Even the best programmers make errors, and sometimes those errors are
very costly.

All humans make mistakes as complex procedures become redundant, like
memory management in C.  That's just human nature.

Only the very best programmers manage memory better than a well written
GC system.

C could also do things which make memory management less troublesome.

Again, a few simple changes and it could do most of what is useful about
OO with nice syntactic sugar, and this would help the memory management
issue too.

But yeah, some people just don't need to be near a programmer.  Even
with GC, I want programmers who understand memory management.  You can
make bad mistakes with GC too.



-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["Trouble rather the tiger in his lair than
the sage amongst his books For to you kingdoms and their armies are mighty
and enduring,  but to him they are but toys of the moment to be overturned
by the flicking of a finger." - anonymous     ]