4 ms·

I love how so many people here argue with the Walter Bright about technical aspects of C. I have been a member of many programming languages communities, and e

by dpc_pw 6y ago

I love how so many people here argue with the Walter Bright about technical aspects of C. I have been a member of many programming languages communities, and every language has its own culture. C was always a language for the arrogant. "The real programmers" that can handle their memory, not afraid to work with pointers and that can get their code right. I've been there, done that for many years, and became more humble with time. In a way I still love the brutal simplicity and low-level nature of C, but I would use it only if absolutely can't use any other language for technical reasons, and I would be really, really cautious.

moon4u 6y ago
> Oh, how they dare argue with WALTER BRIGHT. The hubris! With all due respect, but if someone says something invalid, the fact that they have authority on a subject does not mean that we should agree. As far as I understand the article (And I'm not the great Walter Bright, so I may be wrong) - the author states that "void foo(char a[..])" is better syntax than "void foo(size_t s, char a[])" but does not provide any arguments for it. Furthermore, the author initially fails to mention that there has been an attempt to fix the array-to-pointer-decay issue, when discussing "C's Biggest Mistake". So, yeah, the author may be right that this has been C's biggest mistake. I don't know whether that is true or not, I do not have his experience. It is certainly true that this mistake would be high on rankings of all mistakes that C did. Still, the initial "sleight of hand" move followed by unsubstantiated argument leads to a post with the quality similar to that of a twitter post. Maybe even worse, since, you know, it's posted on a place other than twitter, so we are actually talking about it as if it was something serious.

4 ms·

I love how so many people here argue with the Walter Bright about technical aspects of C. I have been a member of many programming languages communities, and e

by dpc_pw 6y ago

moon4u 6y ago
> Oh, how they dare argue with WALTER BRIGHT. The hubris! With all due respect, but if someone says something invalid, the fact that they have authority on a subject does not mean that we should agree. As far as I understand the article (And I'm not the great Walter Bright, so I may be wrong) - the author states that "void foo(char a[..])" is better syntax than "void foo(size_t s, char a[])" but does not provide any arguments for it. Furthermore, the author initially fails to mention that there has been an attempt to fix the array-to-pointer-decay issue, when discussing "C's Biggest Mistake". So, yeah, the author may be right that this has been C's biggest mistake. I don't know whether that is true or not, I do not have his experience. It is certainly true that this mistake would be high on rankings of all mistakes that C did. Still, the initial "sleight of hand" move followed by unsubstantiated argument leads to a post with the quality similar to that of a twitter post. Maybe even worse, since, you know, it's posted on a place other than twitter, so we are actually talking about it as if it was something serious.