Is C a 'good' programming language?

[RichardCranium]

It's for Windoze 2...

I was sensible and waited for Windows 386. That way there'd be no bugs, bloat or wrinkles. All sorted out. Forever.

[jmo21]

*insert some really tedious problem with C here*

*insert some really tedious great fact about Java here*

[voodooflux]

I had the book by the bloke who wrote Doom, that went into insane detail in how to squeeze every possible bit of performance out of VGA and the x86, and I remember that talking about planes. Chock full of assember. I wish I still had it - I guess it was the company's.

Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book? I stil have mine

The CD-ROM that came with was also a goldmine of information, and contained a lot of his "Zen" articles on assembler.

Jeff Atwood is a fan of it too.

[d000hg]

Stone me... "my dad"...

I guess... I was a nerdy kid learning about all that stuff 15 years ago.

Good times... coding a 3D engine during my GCSEs

[d000hg]

All this I did was 256 colour mode - i.e. 8bpp and a palette. We spent ages working on algorithms to try to pick the optimium palette and dithering algorithms in order to make photos look as good as possible when reduced to 256 colours. All seems a bit crazy these days where nobody would dream of having anything other than a 24bpp display.

I did something similar, I seem to recall some horrible algorithm searching color space to minimise errors.


I don't have Abrash's "Black Book", but has anyone else read "Computer Graphics : Principles and Practice" by Foley et al?

[VectraMan]

Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book? I stil have mine

I think it was the Zen of Graphics that I had, but I think they're all collections of the same content. I'm tempted to buy a used copy off amazon now.

but has anyone else read "Computer Graphics : Principles and Practice" by Foley et al?

Was that the set of four books? That sounds familiar. More theory and maths and less low level guts IIRC.

[voodooflux]

I don't have Abrash's "Black Book", but has anyone else read "Computer Graphics : Principles and Practice" by Foley et al?

Yep, I still have the Pascal edition kicking around somewhere.

[voodooflux]

I think it was the Zen of Graphics that I had, but I think they're all collections of the same content. I'm tempted to buy a used copy off amazon now.

I recall the "Zen" (graphics and assembly) books were collections of his essays and papers, and the Black Book (combined with the contents of the CD-ROM) was a superset of those and some newer material.

[Zippy]

Used C some years ago for programming basic control system. I didn't dislike it but had to get my head round it quickly so we were natural enemies.

Complete sod to work out what was going on if it went wrong - compile OK, run OK, die on its arse a few minutes later. Grr (or possibly kaboom).

I think it toughened me up a bit and I'm sure I understood a lot more about programming and microprocessors then. Really miss it actually

Not a crap language - iz tools for the job innit?

[TimberWolf]

I did something similar, I seem to recall some horrible algorithm searching color space to minimise errors.


I don't have Abrash's "Black Book", but has anyone else read "Computer Graphics : Principles and Practice" by Foley et al?

Yep. I wrote a 3D graphics engine once (in Java though) and used C and C++ (and OpenGL) to do some physical based modelling that I was interested in at the time (Goldstein, Classical Mechanics anyone?). C was good for there, but I've also used C++ in a business project and that was nuts.