Writing simple stuff in C

I have a photo somewhere of a stretch Trabant that does tourist trips around Dresden. Not sure what engine it’s got in it, but it doesn’t sound like a Trabant engine. Not a spot of rust visible on it – you don’t get much rust on fibreglass. Whether the chassis is (a) rusty, (b) in any way related to a standard Trabant chassis, I’ve no idea. It’s got several feet of extra steel welded in the middle if it is.

Found it!

Hmmm, looks like a stretch Mini.
Though, the guy standing because the car on the road side…looks like a priest ¹. Is that an omen, maybe? Bless the car before one gets in, or there to administer final rites afterwards? ;-)

¹ Given how today has been (a great demonstration of the validity of Murphy’s Law), this is of course the part where you reply “Dude, that’s ME”, right?

If you think C# (or Java) is impossible to debug, what do you think is a language or environment that is easy to debug?

Apart from an OU course in Java I never actually used it for anything. Before doing C# I was playing around with LISP (mostly extensions in Emacs) and afterwards I moved onto C++ and Qt (Qt Creator) via a short foray into GTK+ written in C. Then I did a bit of embedded C++ and played around with FreeRTOS for a while. I now work exclusively in C on embedded projects using Eclipse, although I will soon be changing jobs again to work with (probably) C# and a load of .NET stuff to handle SQL databases. Aside from that I did a load of work in XSLT and XML, probably more in that than anything else actually. Only recently have I been playing around with C on RISC OS.

In terms of ease of debugging I would rate them as follows (easiest first):

1. Firmware in C using Eclipse (OpenOCD debugger)
2. Qt Creator (once you ignore any draggy-droppy nonsense and write the C++ by hand)
3. Embedded C++ using IAR Workbench
4. LISP in Emacs
5. C in RISC OS (possibly because C is the language I’m most comfortable with though…I’ll admit to being a little bit disappointed with the way the DDE worked when I first got to it because I was expecting something more IDE-like)
6. C# in Visual Studio (it lost out to C in RISC OS because while I agree it may be possible to debug it effectively it did it in such a round-about messed up manner it typically just made me angry)
7. DocBook XSLT
8. The stupid in-house version of XSLT that I had to use for 6 months for a stupid company that shall remain nameless.

Rick – not sure which guy you mean. I’m the one standing on the pavement, the guy in the road is the owner of the vehicle. I’ve not been in it, but I have seen it driving around. He drives like a bit of a maniac – racing against Mercs at the lights and stuff. Beats them too – for about 20 yards.