3 ms·

I would argue that a lot more of the worlds productive plumbing depends on C-based apps/libraries/frameworks than we would care to admit - its just that its 'no

by mmjaa 9y ago

I would argue that a lot more of the worlds productive plumbing depends on C-based apps/libraries/frameworks than we would care to admit - its just that its 'not sexy' enough for the young-uns to get behind and start using, since everyone knows that C is a greybeard language and, therefore, not cool. The same argument ("so much gets done") was made for Visual Basic back in the day, you know. Oh, how the hoipolloi cried and crowed for the death of C developers back then. Oh, how they were wrong, oh so wrong! I'm not saying the world doesn't have a debt to pay to the Node/Javascript camp - it surely does. I just feel that there is something really missing in the scene, if in fact things that C developers knew and applied well 'back in the day' are just now being re-discovered as "Cool New Shit™" by those who chose - willingly - to ignore the very mechanics of the components their stacks are highly dependent on. Still, I guess its not worth complaining. Its good to know that JS guys can get over the wall, and discover that we've all been using state machines for decades now, and so on, eventually. I just wish there was a lot less hubris on the "crowing about it" side of things. Honestly, JS guys: you should know a little C. Its still there, underneath all the cool shit, and you're still heavily, heavily dependent on it, no matter what your "npm up" tells you...

coldtea 9y ago
>The same argument ("so much gets done") was made for Visual Basic back in the day, you know. And it was right, to the argument is moot. VB was a very productive language. Any issues where with the ecosystem moving on, not with VB (which had its warts, but all languages do, C first of all). >Oh, how the hoipolloi cried and crowed for the death of C developers back then. Oh, how they were wrong, oh so wrong! Again, they were right, oh so right. We do 1000x the programming we did in 1980 and 1990, but we don't use 1000x more C programmers (or assembly or pascal, two other popular choices at the time). Tons of code that used to be that, is now written in higher level languages.
pjmlp 9y ago
> Oh, how the hoipolloi cried and crowed for the death of C developers back then. Oh, how they were wrong, oh so wrong! Which is kind of true for us on Windows. Most of the C has been replaced by C++, to the point that even the new C runtime library is actually written in C++ with extern "C" entry points. Also for those of us on Android, where using the NDK is an exercise in patience writing JNI boilerplate, because Google doesn't want us using it more than strictly necessary. Oh and the two most beloved open source C compilers (gcc and clang) are actually written in C++. Now I admit that on traditional UNIX systems and embedded development on hardware constrained systems, getting rid of C is an impossible task.
Tade0 9y ago
> since everyone knows that C is a greybeard language and, therefore, not cool. As a person who works as a front-end developer but after hours writes almost exclusively in Rust I think I could shed some light on what's going on here: Since JS is so accessible a lot of the folks who work with it don't even have a formal education in Computer Science(like the author, who's a CS student), so many of them never touched a compiled language in their life, not to mention subjects regarding CS. To these people most of the concepts in C(like manual memory management) are entirely foreign. It's not that they don't _like_ C, it's that they're utterly unaware of the mindset one has to have to write things in it. EDIT: grammar.
tcfunk 9y ago
In my purely anecdotal experience, learning web-based technology over C/C++ was not a choice I made personally. It was a career path that was foisted upon me by job availability and hiring requirements. I have yet to see a job posting for a fresh-off-the-boat C developer. It's nearly always 5-10 years industry-related experience required. Web, on the other hand, seems more willing to take on the new guys.
- vostok 9y ago
  I think they're more willing to take new people mostly because there are more jobs and not enough programmers in Web.

by mmjaa 9y ago

coldtea 9y ago

>The same argument ("so much gets done") was made for Visual Basic back in the day, you know. And it was right, to the argument is moot. VB was a very productive language. Any issues where with the ecosystem moving on, not with VB (which had its warts, but all languages do, C first of all). >Oh, how the hoipolloi cried and crowed for the death of C developers back then. Oh, how they were wrong, oh so wrong! Again, they were right, oh so right. We do 1000x the programming we did in 1980 and 1990, but we don't use 1000x more C programmers (or assembly or pascal, two other popular choices at the time). Tons of code that used to be that, is now written in higher level languages.

pjmlp 9y ago

> Oh, how the hoipolloi cried and crowed for the death of C developers back then. Oh, how they were wrong, oh so wrong! Which is kind of true for us on Windows. Most of the C has been replaced by C++, to the point that even the new C runtime library is actually written in C++ with extern "C" entry points. Also for those of us on Android, where using the NDK is an exercise in patience writing JNI boilerplate, because Google doesn't want us using it more than strictly necessary. Oh and the two most beloved open source C compilers (gcc and clang) are actually written in C++. Now I admit that on traditional UNIX systems and embedded development on hardware constrained systems, getting rid of C is an impossible task.

Tade0 9y ago

> since everyone knows that C is a greybeard language and, therefore, not cool. As a person who works as a front-end developer but after hours writes almost exclusively in Rust I think I could shed some light on what's going on here: Since JS is so accessible a lot of the folks who work with it don't even have a formal education in Computer Science(like the author, who's a CS student), so many of them never touched a compiled language in their life, not to mention subjects regarding CS. To these people most of the concepts in C(like manual memory management) are entirely foreign. It's not that they don't _like_ C, it's that they're utterly unaware of the mindset one has to have to write things in it. EDIT: grammar.

tcfunk 9y ago

In my purely anecdotal experience, learning web-based technology over C/C++ was not a choice I made personally. It was a career path that was foisted upon me by job availability and hiring requirements. I have yet to see a job posting for a fresh-off-the-boat C developer. It's nearly always 5-10 years industry-related experience required. Web, on the other hand, seems more willing to take on the new guys.

vostok 9y ago
I think they're more willing to take new people mostly because there are more jobs and not enough programmers in Web.