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Beginners will feel overconfident and some will even try to teach more experienced coders how to do things "right" regardless of these types of articles. We've

by simias 9y ago

Beginners will feel overconfident and some will even try to teach more experienced coders how to do things "right" regardless of these types of articles. We've all been there and we probably still are in some fashion. I don't see how that diminishes the value of TFA though. Any kind of guidelines can be "abused" by taking it to the extreme without actually taking the time to consider if it actually makes sense. Also while I do have significantly more than 10 years of experience in C I think it's silly to say that you can't criticize the language if you can't recite the K&R by heart. You don't need to know all the intricacies of C's aliasing rules to peruse the long list of CVEs caused by faulty memory handling. The world of computing changed drastically over the past decades, for a given application maybe C or C++ was a great choice in the 90's, doesn't mean there's no better alternative now. People telling everybody to ditch C like it never existed and rewrite everything in Rust or Go are silly and are probably the junior coders you're talking about who lack real world experience. Doesn't mean that the opposite reaction of "if it ain't completely broke don't fix it" is any more clever.

ccommsxx 9y ago
Well, I agree with you on practically everything you said. Just for the record, I never intended to imply that somebody should not criticize their tools until they fully mastered them and I certainly don't claim to have done so. I just (tried to) say that I don't like it when others recite opinions from some blog post without even a basic understanding of the issues at hand as I find it leads to a very superficial discourse. I also didn't mean to imply that new projects should be done in C/C++ for the sake of historical reasons or something similar. In fact, I actually recently started working on a new project, written in rust (!) in an industrial setting. Part of the reason for my original comment is that I found there was _a lot_ of cult in content related to rust, in their marketing material and on rust-related posts on HN. While I really like some parts of the language, this aspect of the rust community is really turning me off at the moment and I hope it will get better over time.
- alfiedotwtf 9y ago
  Let's say you're a fresh grad and looking at options for you future dev career: Option 1. Spend the next 5 years learning the ins and outs of C++, where it can bite you, where it can go wrong, all the intricate edge cases, etc... and you'll come out a better C++ programmer. Hopefully after 5 years of hard concentration, you may be able to write safe code (I still haven't met a C++ programmer that hasn't been burned by segfaults in production). Option 2. Spend a single month learning Rust. Play with it for another month or even two just to be sure. Hopefully after the 3rd month, they'll be 100% certain that their code won't break because of errors that are above their pay grade. I've done programming for over 12 years. x86 assembly and C for the earlier years. Then I realised that higher level languages gave me the power to code confidently without causing the errors that I was constantly seeing without explanation. After many years of HLL I wanted to go back down to the metal... after everything that I knew, "C or C++, not even once". Rust gives me the confidence to "compile once, run safe everywhere".
  - ccommsxx 9y ago
    >> Spend the next 5 years learning the ins and outs of C++, [..,] Spend a single month learning Rust. Play with it for another month or even two just to be sure. Hopefully after the 3rd month, they'll be 100% certain that their code won't break [...] Rust gives me the confidence to "compile once, run safe everywhere". See, this is exactly the fallacy that I am criticizing. I think the belief that "C++ is too hard to learn but one could become a good systems programmer in rust in a few months" is - frankly - misguided. I think that in order to become a good systems programmer in rust, you _will_ have to know all of your systems basics (i.e. you should already be able to code in C for starters) and then some more. But sadly this seems to be the spin that their marketing is pushing also. Personally, I found practical rust (that interfaces with actual system libraries - think openssl) to be more or less on par with good C++11 with RAII memory and ressource management in terms of practical memory safety. Having somebody writing rust code without a basic understanding of things like ressource management and threading is just as bad as having them writing "unsafe" C(++) code. I hope I'm not feeding the trolls here.
    - alfiedotwtf 9y ago
fnl 9y ago
As already posted in another thread for this GP, I completely disagree with the overall sentiment of this whole discussion that is throwing (modern) C++ (i.e., C++11 ff.) into the same bucket with (any version of) C. What I can agree to, however, is that C should be your first choice if (a) you have to, or (b) because you like it and probably (c) because you are several times more likely to find a job if you know C as opposed to Rust or Go (unless living in very specific areas of this world - maybe...?). And then go learn Rust/Go/..., anyways :-).

by simias 9y ago

ccommsxx 9y ago

Well, I agree with you on practically everything you said. Just for the record, I never intended to imply that somebody should not criticize their tools until they fully mastered them and I certainly don't claim to have done so. I just (tried to) say that I don't like it when others recite opinions from some blog post without even a basic understanding of the issues at hand as I find it leads to a very superficial discourse. I also didn't mean to imply that new projects should be done in C/C++ for the sake of historical reasons or something similar. In fact, I actually recently started working on a new project, written in rust (!) in an industrial setting. Part of the reason for my original comment is that I found there was _a lot_ of cult in content related to rust, in their marketing material and on rust-related posts on HN. While I really like some parts of the language, this aspect of the rust community is really turning me off at the moment and I hope it will get better over time.

alfiedotwtf 9y ago
Let's say you're a fresh grad and looking at options for you future dev career: Option 1. Spend the next 5 years learning the ins and outs of C++, where it can bite you, where it can go wrong, all the intricate edge cases, etc... and you'll come out a better C++ programmer. Hopefully after 5 years of hard concentration, you may be able to write safe code (I still haven't met a C++ programmer that hasn't been burned by segfaults in production). Option 2. Spend a single month learning Rust. Play with it for another month or even two just to be sure. Hopefully after the 3rd month, they'll be 100% certain that their code won't break because of errors that are above their pay grade. I've done programming for over 12 years. x86 assembly and C for the earlier years. Then I realised that higher level languages gave me the power to code confidently without causing the errors that I was constantly seeing without explanation. After many years of HLL I wanted to go back down to the metal... after everything that I knew, "C or C++, not even once". Rust gives me the confidence to "compile once, run safe everywhere".
- ccommsxx 9y ago
  >> Spend the next 5 years learning the ins and outs of C++, [..,] Spend a single month learning Rust. Play with it for another month or even two just to be sure. Hopefully after the 3rd month, they'll be 100% certain that their code won't break [...] Rust gives me the confidence to "compile once, run safe everywhere". See, this is exactly the fallacy that I am criticizing. I think the belief that "C++ is too hard to learn but one could become a good systems programmer in rust in a few months" is - frankly - misguided. I think that in order to become a good systems programmer in rust, you _will_ have to know all of your systems basics (i.e. you should already be able to code in C for starters) and then some more. But sadly this seems to be the spin that their marketing is pushing also. Personally, I found practical rust (that interfaces with actual system libraries - think openssl) to be more or less on par with good C++11 with RAII memory and ressource management in terms of practical memory safety. Having somebody writing rust code without a basic understanding of things like ressource management and threading is just as bad as having them writing "unsafe" C(++) code. I hope I'm not feeding the trolls here.
  - alfiedotwtf 9y ago

fnl 9y ago

As already posted in another thread for this GP, I completely disagree with the overall sentiment of this whole discussion that is throwing (modern) C++ (i.e., C++11 ff.) into the same bucket with (any version of) C. What I can agree to, however, is that C should be your first choice if (a) you have to, or (b) because you like it and probably (c) because you are several times more likely to find a job if you know C as opposed to Rust or Go (unless living in very specific areas of this world - maybe...?). And then go learn Rust/Go/..., anyways :-).