3 ms·
> Also, I'm a bit worried about long-term survival of the new language-of-the-day-that-makes-you-look-cool-at-beer-events. I was once told perl would replace C
by andrewmcwatters 6y ago
> Also, I'm a bit worried about long-term survival of the new
language-of-the-day-that-makes-you-look-cool-at-beer-events. I was once
told perl would replace C everywhere. Does someone use it outside of
checkpatch.pl anymore ? Then I was told that C was dead because PHP was
appearing everywhere. I've even seen (slow) log processors written with
it. Now PHP seems to only be a WAF-selling argument. Then Ruby was "safe"
and would rule them all. Safe as its tab[-1] which crashed the interpreter.
Anyone heard of it recently ? Then Python, whose 2.7 is still present on
a lot of systems because the forced transition to 3 broke tons of code.
Will there ever be a 4 after this sore experience ? Then JS, Rust, Go,
Zig and I don't know what. What I'm noting is that such languages appear,
serve a purpose well, have their moment of fame, last a decade and
disappear except at a few enthousiasts. C has been there for 50 years
and served as the basis of many newer languages so it's still well
understood. I'm sure about one thing, the C bugs we have today will be
fixable in 20 years. I'm not even sure the Rust code we'll merge today
will still be compilable in 10 years nor will support the relevant
architectures available by then, and probably this code will have to
be rewritten in C to become maintained again.[1]
[1]: https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/4/16/283 https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/4/16/283