Lazy Programmers ...

[perseusprime]

Taken from this week's CodeProject newsletter:

WEEKLY POLL RESULTS
Which features would you most like in a language?
http://www.codeproject.com/script/survey/detail.asp?survey=424

Set support (as in Pascal)272.3
The goto statement302.5
PERL's tuple

Comments

[artor]

I can't say I don't like auto-collection, but yes it's sad. Hell, it threw me for a loop using managed memory for the first time. But, that's the point of programming, automate everything so almost nothing is manual!

[perseusprime]

To an extent, yes. C++ gives you a near feature in that it allows the programmer to control all aspects of memory usage. It really isn't that hard to write your own collection classes to maintain arrays and lists for you (and if you are sticking local variables or an excessive amount of non-collection objects on the heap, you need to rethink your design). Hell, you could even make them thread-safe (which, unforunately, is something the standard library has failed to include). I have no problem with having people write classes to perform memory operations, since it still allows me to do my own optimizations. I do have a problem with forcing me to use a specific implementation for garbage collection. Putting that crap in the language construct takes away flexibility and power in exchange for lack of memory leaks (which are still possible in some implementations like Java's).