"Here’s the metaphor I like to use: assembly coding is infantry: as fine-grained as one could want to be, but slow (to write), lumbering along at 3.1 miles per hour. C is a tank. It’s robust, it’s powerful, and it’s extremely impressive and well-designed, but it moves at ground speeds: about 50 miles per hour. That’s what it’s designed to do. Languages like Python and Ocaml are airplanes– very fast, from a development perspective, but not fine-grained at all. C++ exists because someone had a fever dream in which these two classes of vehicles got mixed up and thought, “I’m going to put wings on a fucking tank”. The drag and awkwardness imposed by the wings made it terrible as a tank, but it doesn’t fly well either. Java was invented after a few horrible tank-plane crashes, the realization being that the things are too powerful and fly too fast. It’s a similarly ridiculous “tank-icopter”. It’s not as fast as the tank-plane, and few people enjoy flying them, but it’s less likely to kill people."

http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012...

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