[tejuis]

I agree. If you take the tool perspective, it is easy to understand that different tools are needed for different tasks. Don't use hammer for sawing. No single language scales to all corners of programming problems.

Actually I really don't get this endless "silver bullet" discussion. C has its place and for very good reasons. Also the author makes really good points about the integration aspects of C.

[cjfd]

I read this thought quite often here on hacker news but it is a bit alien to me. To me the charm of programming is the ability to---at least in theory---write anything. This is also embodied in the idea of Turing completeness.

There is a continuum between the possibilities of a programming language and the possibilities of a configuration file. As soon as one says that a programming language is suitable for a particular purpose one has moved a few steps towards the configuration file end of this continuum.

This is, of course, a personal preference but I very much prefer to enjoy the power of programming language as opposed to the lack thereof of configuration files. Therefore, I like programming languages that attempt to be useful for any purpose. My favorite language is still C++ and if I were to switch to something else I would be inclined towards Rust.

[peterwwillis]

A bit of rope is charming because you can build practically anything out of rope. For example, you can build skyscrapers out of bamboo and rope. But if you want that skyscraper to be useful, durable, safe, etc it may be better to use the rope for what rope is best at, and use other materials and tools for what they're best at.

[Kaiyou]

Somehow I was expecting Lisp instead of C++ after all you've said. Any specific reason why you're not using Lisp?

[pjmlp]

Being the language to write UNIX clones, that is all about it.

[nwmcsween]

So by your definition the windows kernel is unix?