This was originally brought to my attention by @MMcLaren
Source: http://www.httpjoke.com/general.html

When I find my code in tons of trouble,
Friends and colleagues come to me,
Speaking words of wisdom:
"Write in C."
As the deadline fast approaches,
And bugs are all that I can see,
Somewhere, someone whispers:
"Write in C."
Write in C, Write in C,
Write in C, oh, Write in C.
LOGO's dead and buried,
Write in C.
I used to write a lot of FORTRAN,
For science it worked flawlessly.
Try using it for graphics!
Write in C.
If you've just spent nearly 30 hours,
Debugging some assembly,
Soon you will be glad to
Write in C.
Write in C, Write in C,
Write in C, yeah, Write in C.
BASIC's not the answer.
Write in C.
Write in C, Write in C
Write in C, oh, Write in C.
Pascal won't quite cut it.
Write in C.

 

C is high-wire tightrope walking without a balancing beam on a thin wire covered with ice.

I love it.

 

C is high-wire tightrope walking without a balancing beam on a thin wire covered with ice.

I love it.

.asm: no wire.

 

In any language, there are standard code structures. Hence, one can argue that almost any feature is available in almost any language, if you know these structures. And in fact an intimate knowledge of standard structures is necessary to write efficient code.

I’m familiar with FORTRAN, BASIC, assembly (on many platforms), Arduino C. And to a lesser amount, Pascal, COBOL, RPG, Lisp, Javascript, VBS, etc... In fact, I worked on a e-commerce application entirely written in JavaScript. The first thing a new programmer had to do was complete training in Java Standard Structures.

<rant>
In my experience, C takes the best of its predecessors. With an intelligent IDE, it’s main complaint about its strict syntax is minimized. The one feature I would like is stricter variable typing, with an escape keyword for those times the programmer knows what he is doing and purposefully breaks typing rules. Or an alias keyword that allows a variable to have different typing.

Because I have to carefully code to avoid errors introduced by cross-typing conversions. I have seen some convoluted code to deal with this issue
</rant>

 

Or an alias keyword that allows a variable to have different typing.

Isn't that what union and void pointers are for?

 

.asm: no wire.

ASM no wire.

 

My last serious assembly programming job was on the old Harris H-series super minicomputer for some data conversion work for General Dynamics in San Diego. After they approved the test data, I converted the original code to FORTRAN and added batch job for the operators to run.
https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_harrisbrocrochureNov81_8824625
https://books.google.com/books?id=U...v=onepage&q=harris corp H300 computer&f=false

 

My last serious assembly programming job was on the old Harris H-series super minicomputer for some data conversion work for General Dynamics in San Diego. After they approved the test data, I converted the original code to FORTRAN and added batch job for the operators to run.
https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_harrisbrocrochureNov81_8824625
https://books.google.com/books?id=U1c85W3p-SQC&pg=PA89&lpg=PA89&dq=harris+corp+H300+computer&source=bl&ots=x1LT-rW8Ez&sig=ACfU3U3x8t9a3WD1EkCtVTSBwuoIyXAFOw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwibuYKs_4XiAhWWup4KHSSpADQQ6AEwBHoECAUQAQ#v=onepage&q=harris corp H300 computer&f=false

My code from this project keeps on evolving -- into multiple projects and platforms.

It is now approaching 20K lines of .asm code, and I still haven't gotten close to exhausting the PIC18F execution bandwidth at 8 MHz.