Garbage collection wouldn't be necessary

If programmers learned not to litter

>>40
optimise my anus!

Welcome to C. You must be new. Enjoy your malloc() and free().

Seriously, go crank open an old school book on actual Computer Science sometime, as opposed to the standard Java diploma mill schmutz that mostly gets pumped out nowadays. The more I (slowly) learn, the more I realize there's bugger all math or science involved in 99% of today's mainstream programming and languages. It's mostly bureaucracy, ideology, and good ole John Wayne cowboyism; just high-functioning Dunning Kruger-ism.

To quote Guy Steele (before he went to the dark side): "The most important concept in all of computer science is abstraction."

Everything else is just the tedious mechanical crap you've gotta wade through on your way to being able to say what you mean. And modern mainstream languages are *fantastically good* at drowning that one simple truth under such infinite barrels of crap. Sorry, but if your only pleasure in life is spelunking code all day, every day, there is something wrong with you as a person. Go write a metacircular evaluator. I'll wait.

>>42
The wisest thing ever said on /prog/ was that programming is demeaning. My kneejerk reaction was that this was wrong, but after puzzling over it for a few years, I can see the brilliance of it. Anonymous wasn't speaking of the nature of programming, or an idealized programming, or anything like that, he was speaking of programming as it is practiced. Programming in C or Java is not an mental exercise (though it too often is mental masturbation), it is a menial one. One does not create universes by fiddling with electrons, electrons are just a building block. Likewise, it is likely to be impossible for a human programmer to ever creating meaningful programs while he is tethered to the ground by his limited toolset. Languages like Scheme set the programmer free from the tedious shackles of manual memory management, and allow him to instantly begin exploring the beautiful side of programming. Lisp is a language for humans, C is a language for computers. To program in C (or any other low level language), one forces oneself to subsume the role of the computer, to become it. How is that fitting for great beings such as ourselves?

>>43
It's a trade off. Do you want fine control over the computer? The price to pay for this control is a more complex programming paradigm as you're required to specify the details of what to control. If you prefer a more abstract programming paradigm, there are other languages that are designed to automatically manage the machine bookkeeping aspect of programming.

I like C and I use it for what it is good for: a systems level programming language good for writing operating systems, compiler tools and other applications that would benefit from explicit programmer control. Most of the applications that I write don't need such level of control so I prefer to reduce my cognitive burden by using a more abstract language. Scheme is my general purpose language of choice.

You wanna know what's a good systems language, vee-echci-fucking-dee-ell.

the average gro needs GC bc he can't into low level stuff

If Java has garbage collection, why doesn't it collect itself?

>>47
Because it's not a Lisp dialect.

>>7
only if you put certain restrictions on the code, that lisp/scheme don't.

i know mercury has compile-time gc