4 ms·

I mean, there's CppCon as mentioned in the article, and C++ has pretty much the same wide reach as C.

by tpush 8y ago

AlphaSite 8y ago
To be honest C is kinda boring. Which is fine, but makes it hard to do a C conference.
- varjag 8y ago
  Fair point, but Go or PHP hardly sound more exciting.
  - Koshkin 8y ago
    I guess, some languages have to fight for their place under the sun, some don't.
  - cies 8y ago
    That for different reasons. Go is not a general purpose language (it's creators specifically focus it's uses on networked apps). PHP is on the decline, nothing kills excitement like decline.
  - weberc2 8y ago
    I'm a heavy Go and Python user, and you're right that Go isn't particularly interesting--it doesn't change terribly rapidly, but it's also simple enough that you can do interesting and useful deep-dive sessions into the garbage collector or scheduler or other aspects of the runtime or the toolchain. You could also speculate or discuss proposals for Go2. There have also been significant recent changes to the dependency management scheme which affect pretty much everyone. I don't think there's much of an analog for C. Most of the interesting stuff in C revolves around things you would think you can depend on but actually break in really weird and interesting ways (misc undefined behavior, sizes for integral types on different architectures, idiosyncracies of the preprocessor, the way to trivially exploit that pattern you used to avoid buffer overflow exploits). But most of that is just depressing.
- welly 8y ago
  Boring in what way? Some of the coolest stuff we work with is built with C. C is ace. C is cooler than C++
- spork12 8y ago
  I think it's more that C programmers don't really consider themselves part of a C culture in the same way that python, go, ruby, php etc programmers do. C programmers usually have another interest like kernel dev, firmware dev, or 3d game engines that is more interesting to them than the language itself.
DonHopkins 8y ago
Please tell me that CppCon isn't a conference just for the C Preprocessor? I hate it when you go to one of those Makerfests, and it actually turns out to be about Makefiles.
- inoiox 8y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/user/CppCon https://www.youtube.com/user/CppCon Actually is a really good conference to learn Software Development beyond C++
simias 8y ago
C++ is a wildly unstable language compared to C. Every new standard brings a slew of new coding paradigms and features, often changing the way to write C++ code pretty fundamentally. On top of that C++ is a hellish beast of a language of such tremendous complexity that you can probably host hundreds of conference where you'd teach even experienced C++ coders things they don't know. They won't run out of material any time soon. Meanwhile a C conference would have a hard time coming up with interesting content year after year IMO. You'd end up having to talk about how C is used more than C itself, but then you're no longer really doing C-con, you're doing "embedded-con" or "high performance trading con" etc... I agree with the parent when they compare C to a hammer, it's a super useful tool and I'm glad that we have it but it's not like I could talk about it for hours (or hear somebody else talk about it for that matter).
- shaklee3 8y ago
  This is completely false. C++11 introduced a lot of new paradigms, and that's it. That shift was for the better, and I haven't met a single person who can honestly say that the changes they made turned it into a worse language. Quite the opposite: it's more expressive, readable, and easier to use.
  - simias 8y ago
    My comment wasn't meant to disparage C++, I'm not saying it's not improving, I'm just pointing out that it's a massively complex language and that it's still evolving in major ways so there's stuff to talk about. C hasn't really introduced significant "new paradigms" in a long while.

I mean, there's CppCon as mentioned in the article, and C++ has pretty much the same wide reach as C.

by tpush 8y ago

I mean, there's CppCon as mentioned in the article, and C++ has pretty much the same wide reach as C.

AlphaSite 8y ago

To be honest C is kinda boring. Which is fine, but makes it hard to do a C conference.

varjag 8y ago
Fair point, but Go or PHP hardly sound more exciting.
- Koshkin 8y ago
  I guess, some languages have to fight for their place under the sun, some don't.
- cies 8y ago
  That for different reasons. Go is not a general purpose language (it's creators specifically focus it's uses on networked apps). PHP is on the decline, nothing kills excitement like decline.
- weberc2 8y ago
  I'm a heavy Go and Python user, and you're right that Go isn't particularly interesting--it doesn't change terribly rapidly, but it's also simple enough that you can do interesting and useful deep-dive sessions into the garbage collector or scheduler or other aspects of the runtime or the toolchain. You could also speculate or discuss proposals for Go2. There have also been significant recent changes to the dependency management scheme which affect pretty much everyone. I don't think there's much of an analog for C. Most of the interesting stuff in C revolves around things you would think you can depend on but actually break in really weird and interesting ways (misc undefined behavior, sizes for integral types on different architectures, idiosyncracies of the preprocessor, the way to trivially exploit that pattern you used to avoid buffer overflow exploits). But most of that is just depressing.
welly 8y ago
Boring in what way? Some of the coolest stuff we work with is built with C. C is ace. C is cooler than C++
spork12 8y ago
I think it's more that C programmers don't really consider themselves part of a C culture in the same way that python, go, ruby, php etc programmers do. C programmers usually have another interest like kernel dev, firmware dev, or 3d game engines that is more interesting to them than the language itself.

DonHopkins 8y ago

Please tell me that CppCon isn't a conference just for the C Preprocessor? I hate it when you go to one of those Makerfests, and it actually turns out to be about Makefiles.

inoiox 8y ago
https://www.youtube.com/user/CppCon https://www.youtube.com/user/CppCon Actually is a really good conference to learn Software Development beyond C++

simias 8y ago

C++ is a wildly unstable language compared to C. Every new standard brings a slew of new coding paradigms and features, often changing the way to write C++ code pretty fundamentally. On top of that C++ is a hellish beast of a language of such tremendous complexity that you can probably host hundreds of conference where you'd teach even experienced C++ coders things they don't know. They won't run out of material any time soon. Meanwhile a C conference would have a hard time coming up with interesting content year after year IMO. You'd end up having to talk about how C is used more than C itself, but then you're no longer really doing C-con, you're doing "embedded-con" or "high performance trading con" etc... I agree with the parent when they compare C to a hammer, it's a super useful tool and I'm glad that we have it but it's not like I could talk about it for hours (or hear somebody else talk about it for that matter).

shaklee3 8y ago
This is completely false. C++11 introduced a lot of new paradigms, and that's it. That shift was for the better, and I haven't met a single person who can honestly say that the changes they made turned it into a worse language. Quite the opposite: it's more expressive, readable, and easier to use.
- simias 8y ago
  My comment wasn't meant to disparage C++, I'm not saying it's not improving, I'm just pointing out that it's a massively complex language and that it's still evolving in major ways so there's stuff to talk about. C hasn't really introduced significant "new paradigms" in a long while.