First, apologies for the delay in posting; I know that your life has been dimmed by my absence, but I did finish a paper for AoAS. Now, enough hyperbole — more computing.
I came across an older (2006) blog post via this HN post arguing that C/C++ are poor tools for numerical and scientific programming. It’s a bit dated, but I agree with many of Mark’s points. In particular, it is much more difficult to write efficient low-level numerical code in C than in some other languages. This is particularly true compared to, for example, Fortran or functional languages like OCaml.
However, I’m not ready to ditch C/C++ and start building my next project in one of those languages. For these decisions, I think it’s important to distinguish between low- and high-level numerical programming. This point is being hashed-out somewhat in the HN thread, but it seems that relatively few of them are building analytics software for scientific users. From my perspective, I want three (conflicting) traits in my programming language for numerical development: