4 ms·

I regularly use other "modern" languages and still enjoy using C. Am I cult member?

lmm 7y ago
Cultishness is a spectrum, not a binary. C has always had a certain proportion of adherents who believed that "performance" (of code that implements microbenchmarks with unlimited hours of manual tuning) is the most important aspect of a general-purpose programming language, and that the problems of undefined behaviour are insignificant. I would say that both those viewpoints are crazy, but they are increasingly becoming the mainstream in the C community, via the mechanism described in the link: more moderate people are driven out, rendering the community more extreme, which then drives more of the moderate folk out, and so on.
- courtf 7y ago
  I see something similar happening with functional programming. Beyond measurable improvements (ie, in error rate, etc) there is often a mindset where if a language does not implement the latest syntactic patterns, then the language cannot be considered truly functional. HN seems a breeding ground for these sentiments, and adherents can be quite self-righteous. Out in the untamed wilds of the broader industry (and the further you move away from the Stanford sphere) I have found that fanaticism, of all sorts, tends to taper off, to be replaced mostly with the mundane tasks of churning out software for money. Of course, no matter where you hail from, the influence of C is inescapable. Yet, provincial priests are mostly concerned with budgetary constraints and deadlines. If switching to Scala will make hiring 10% easier, then by all means.
  - lmm 7y ago
    One "fun" thing about working in Scala is that you get attacked from all sides; there are people who say that the language is too weird or too purist, and then there are people who say that the problem is that it makes it too easy to have mutable variables or imperative code, or the fact that it allows you to do traditional OO inheritance. FWIW, my experience is that when you introduce a bit of mutable state or hidden side effects, you usually regret it later. I probably come across as fanatical at times, but that fanaticism is coming purely from painful experience; these academic, theoretical concerns become a lot less academic when you've had to deal with production bugs that they could have helped you avoid. I find it impossible to imagine the same being true for the C devotees. I've seen fast and slow programs in all sorts of languages. I've never seen a performance problem in anything other than a scripting language that wasn't either solved with a little bit of profiling, or just fundamentally impossible in any language. I've seen a C++ program rewritten in Haskell for a 5x performance speedup. And I've seen so many segfaults. FWIW, I've found it pretty easy to escape C. In JVM-land you really don't have to deal with it, at least 99.9% of the time; I've hit like two JVM bugs in my entire career. Scala is by no means the easiest to hire for, but it's a great language for getting on with solving business problems - whether you want to do that by churning out reams of code, or by abstracting out the mundane parts and writing only the parts that are specific to the problem. It makes the easy things easy and the hard things possible; very rarely have I felt that the language was limiting me or stopping me from doing what I wanted. There's plenty wrong with it, but it's the best choice I've found.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      It is like the heresy of enabling bounds checking in C. I have hardly seen a program where having bounds checking enabled was an issue, except naturally for stuff like real time audio or software 3D rendering back in the 16 bit days. Even on 8 bit, plenty of successful software was written in Basic perfectly fine (naturally games were another matter). The very few cases that it actually mattered, it sufficed disabling them locally on the hot loop that was actually relevant for it. When using C++, enabling bounds checking on STL library types or making use of at() hardly caused me not to meet customer expectations.
- TwoBit 7y ago
  I don't know anybody who thinks code performance is the most important aspect of "general purpose programming languages". Everybody I know who thinks C is good for performance recognizes it's for specific applications (OSs, graphics, realtime, finance, etc.).
- justinmeiners 7y ago
  Except nobody I know who uses C holds that view. I'm sure they exist, but without a unifying view there is no cult. C is a well established and widely known language with many uses. It's certainly not right for everything. Who is the one with extreme views here?

lmm 7y ago

Cultishness is a spectrum, not a binary. C has always had a certain proportion of adherents who believed that "performance" (of code that implements microbenchmarks with unlimited hours of manual tuning) is the most important aspect of a general-purpose programming language, and that the problems of undefined behaviour are insignificant. I would say that both those viewpoints are crazy, but they are increasingly becoming the mainstream in the C community, via the mechanism described in the link: more moderate people are driven out, rendering the community more extreme, which then drives more of the moderate folk out, and so on.

courtf 7y ago
I see something similar happening with functional programming. Beyond measurable improvements (ie, in error rate, etc) there is often a mindset where if a language does not implement the latest syntactic patterns, then the language cannot be considered truly functional. HN seems a breeding ground for these sentiments, and adherents can be quite self-righteous. Out in the untamed wilds of the broader industry (and the further you move away from the Stanford sphere) I have found that fanaticism, of all sorts, tends to taper off, to be replaced mostly with the mundane tasks of churning out software for money. Of course, no matter where you hail from, the influence of C is inescapable. Yet, provincial priests are mostly concerned with budgetary constraints and deadlines. If switching to Scala will make hiring 10% easier, then by all means.
- lmm 7y ago
  One "fun" thing about working in Scala is that you get attacked from all sides; there are people who say that the language is too weird or too purist, and then there are people who say that the problem is that it makes it too easy to have mutable variables or imperative code, or the fact that it allows you to do traditional OO inheritance. FWIW, my experience is that when you introduce a bit of mutable state or hidden side effects, you usually regret it later. I probably come across as fanatical at times, but that fanaticism is coming purely from painful experience; these academic, theoretical concerns become a lot less academic when you've had to deal with production bugs that they could have helped you avoid. I find it impossible to imagine the same being true for the C devotees. I've seen fast and slow programs in all sorts of languages. I've never seen a performance problem in anything other than a scripting language that wasn't either solved with a little bit of profiling, or just fundamentally impossible in any language. I've seen a C++ program rewritten in Haskell for a 5x performance speedup. And I've seen so many segfaults. FWIW, I've found it pretty easy to escape C. In JVM-land you really don't have to deal with it, at least 99.9% of the time; I've hit like two JVM bugs in my entire career. Scala is by no means the easiest to hire for, but it's a great language for getting on with solving business problems - whether you want to do that by churning out reams of code, or by abstracting out the mundane parts and writing only the parts that are specific to the problem. It makes the easy things easy and the hard things possible; very rarely have I felt that the language was limiting me or stopping me from doing what I wanted. There's plenty wrong with it, but it's the best choice I've found.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    It is like the heresy of enabling bounds checking in C. I have hardly seen a program where having bounds checking enabled was an issue, except naturally for stuff like real time audio or software 3D rendering back in the 16 bit days. Even on 8 bit, plenty of successful software was written in Basic perfectly fine (naturally games were another matter). The very few cases that it actually mattered, it sufficed disabling them locally on the hot loop that was actually relevant for it. When using C++, enabling bounds checking on STL library types or making use of at() hardly caused me not to meet customer expectations.
TwoBit 7y ago
I don't know anybody who thinks code performance is the most important aspect of "general purpose programming languages". Everybody I know who thinks C is good for performance recognizes it's for specific applications (OSs, graphics, realtime, finance, etc.).
justinmeiners 7y ago
Except nobody I know who uses C holds that view. I'm sure they exist, but without a unifying view there is no cult. C is a well established and widely known language with many uses. It's certainly not right for everything. Who is the one with extreme views here?