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Although it was great for it's time, I think now (2019) it's rather silly that you de facto must learn three languages to use C:. C, C preprocessor, and make.

Although it was great for it's time, I think now (2019) it's rather silly that you de facto must learn three languages to use C:. C, C preprocessor, and make. If I had to do that every day (I don't use c, except passingly, and usually in read-only mode) I'd tear my hair out, and that's even before the inevitable footguns I'd write.

P_I_Staker 7y ago
That's not even the half of it. Dealing with the differences between compilers, oftentimes preemptively, and various standards. For a very long time, it was common to build under c89 "just in case". Now you have to deal with the differences between c89, c99, and various industry/internal standards. That's not even considering how configurable compilers are, and all the features to consider. Then as you said, make or IDE. Much of this isn't necessarily specific to C (lots of toolchains include build scripts, complicated settings, different language revisions, standards, ect., ect., ect.) It does feel especially bad in C though.
flukus 7y ago
> I think now (2019) it's rather silly that you de facto must learn three languages to use C:. C, C preprocessor, and make. That's basically the case with nearly every language. Most will have some sort of equivalent of the pre-processor and it's usually a lot more complicated, c++ template craziness, code generation tools, dynamic meta-programming tools, etc. For all it's faults the simple text substitution of most macros is the least complicated option. Most languages will have there own build tools as well, sometimes it will be the same language with something like rake, other times it's xml or it's own language. And they're nearly always inferior to make in many ways.