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What I find fascinating about C is how mature codebases develop their own meta language with copious macros. These in turn inspired future languages and their b
by adzm 7y ago
What I find fascinating about C is how mature codebases develop their own meta language with copious macros. These in turn inspired future languages and their built-in capabilities.
- _nhynes 7y ago> macros Have you seen idiomatic Rust codebases? Even the macros have macros. It's sheer bliss. "Fheiq kah, puom," as they say.
- eitland 7y agoFor anyone who wonders: https://users.rust-lang.org/t/rust-koans/2408/4 https://users.rust-lang.org/t/rust-koans/2408/4 And yes, I think it is useful to teach this.
- kstenerud 7y agoWhat is the point of that story?
- eitland 7y agoThere's a number of points to this story and maybe one of the reasons I liked it so much is because it says things that are otherwise hard to describe, but here are two pointers: - in the monastry they visit, no two things are equal. I read this as an overapplication of DRY. - the monks speaks an extremely terse language that is so complicated that even their master have to think for a good while before he can say anything. In the story the master also speaks to the newbie in this language, implying that he either doesn't realize nobody else understands it, or maybe rather that he doesn't care so much about being helpful as he cares about being terse.
- cperciva 7y agoNot just mature codebases; also mature developers. I collected a bunch into libcperciva, and I would hate to write code without ELASTICARRAY_DECL, GETOPT, or PARSENUM.
- fit2rule 7y agoMy current preferred language/runtime/execution environment is: just enough C to support the Lua VM. Write low-level stuff in C as necessary, expose it as an abstraction to the Lua VM, write all app logic in Lua. This really represents a great bridge between two worlds and I've just found it so incredibly productive. Disclaimer: grey-beard C dev who doesn't need to learn your new-fangled language that 'fixes' everything (npm, lol) because I already did it decades ago with Lua .. ;)
- flukus 7y ago21st Century C is my favorite. It focuses on the whole ecosystem and not just the language, the more notable GNU extensions and overall pragmatism, most C resources fail at pragmatism.