I hope I'm wrong about this

I've been spending a lot of time lately writing C (yay!) to be called from MATLAB (boo!). Something deep in my code was seg faulting, but I couldn't get close to it because MATLAB's got signal handlers set. Okay, fine, I'll set the handler for SIGSEGV to SIG_DFL and then I can look at the core file.

Getting rid of MATLAB's SIGSEGV handler leads to crash and dump within seconds, even if my code is just the signal() call. Which makes me think that there's something in MATLAB that's seg faulting more or less continuously, and they're putting the train back on the tracks every few seconds.

The grass is so very much greener over in NumPy/SciPy/NiPy land.

Punk languages, my ass

Something about this made me want to punch the guy in the face. I should be a sympathetic audience: C is always my second-favorite language (after the best available Lisp, whatever that is at the moment) and it's often exactly the right tool, because C is all about your being responsible for everything. (Kinda. Sorta. Less responsible for everything than you think, really.) But the argument here is so weak, and depends on such a weird view of what makes a language good, that my knuckles get to itching.

Also, assuming that there's something punk about C, anyone who thinks that ObjC (or, gods help us, C++) is punk too is the same sort of person who would call Green Day punk. Don't even get me started on f'n JavaScript.