4 ms·
Any other "real world" software can be ugly and can be beautifully written in any language, including C (except ones where being cryptic is by design). Basic
by FpUser 6y ago
Any other "real world" software can be ugly and can be beautifully written in any language, including C (except ones where being cryptic is by design).
Basic C can be picked up in very short time. there is nothing to be frightened about. When I first laid my hands on C I wrote working software (keyboard driver for DOS) in a first day as a learning exercise. Not sure what other than incompetence as a programmers is causing your expensive PhDs "fright of their lifetime".
- baybal2 6y ago> Not sure what other than incompetence as a programmers is causing your expensive PhDs "fright of their lifetime". Memory management, handwritten loops, pointers everywhere, absence of ready made data structures, error handling (or its absence,) epopeia with C strings, sanitizing inputs, and nausea from the slightest smell of SIMD, or basic binary hackery to begin with.
- FpUser 6y agoThose are needed for the tasks C was made to handle: complete control over everything being a primary one. If you do not need those tasks you do not need C. And if you do then get used to it.
- zepto 6y agoOdd how well rust seems to manage to avoid them. C was amazing when it was introduced, but is as archaic as COBOL today. We are stuck with it because of legacy.
- FpUser 6y ago>"C was amazing when it was introduced" It was not amazing. It was decent particular tool for particular job. That was all about it. Same thing about Rust. There are no silver bullets laying around.
- zepto 6y agoWhether you want to say it was amazing or not, it’s a legacy tool now.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y agoWhat do the cool kids use to write realtime or realtime-ish software with these days? What gets used for firmware? What gets used to write kernels? What gets used when you have to interact with hardware that uses memory mapped registers? It might be C++ instead of C for some of the above, but that doesn't make C "a legacy tool".
- zepto 6y agoI’m not saying it isn’t used. I’m saying it’s a legacy tool from the early 70’s that is absolutely terrible compared to what we could have. Cool kids use it because there is no alternative.
- FpUser 6y agoIt is not
- zepto 6y agoTwo words: Buffer overrun
- pjmlp 6y agoAmazing only to those that never looked outside Bell Labs. Amazing was what Burroughs was doing in 1961, 10 years before C came to be, IBM RISC research in PL/S and PL.8, VAX/VMS stuff in BLISS, Solo OS in Concurrent Pascal, Xerox XDE in Mesa, .... Those were amazing in the 60's and mid-70's.