3 ms·

> Funny how we can get stuck with a language from the early 70s and we're still in the process of replacing it half a century later. I see that as a good thing

> Funny how we can get stuck with a language from the early 70s and we're still in the process of replacing it half a century later. I see that as a good thing. I’d much rather have a battle tested framework than everything being rewritten every 5 years in whatever is currently trendy simply because a new generation of developers are suffering from NIH (not invented here) syndrome. I mean, yes C has its problems so I’m all for using safer languages, but just take a look at the mess that is front end web development and tell me that the alternative isn’t better. I seriously hope languages like Rust do evolve into being much more than a fad. I’ve been in the industry a fair few years now and have seen languages fall in and out of favour (Pascal, Java, OCaml, Go, etc sure someone of them are still popular but nowhere near as much as when their respective hype machine was in town) and really what systems development really needs is another ‘C’ — as in a language that survives the next 50 years as a standard low level language that people can build solid operating systems from. Whatever language people want to code on top of that base is then fair game.

jarcane 5y ago
A language cannot "survive the next 50 years" if people are too hidebound to refuse to let go of the current 50 year old language. You are asking for the equivalent of those job listings that demand "10+ years experience" in a tech that's only been out for 5.
- laumars 5y ago
  You’re being rather unfair with your interpretation of my post there. I’ve clearly demonstrated in my writing that I’m in favour of other languages growing. There’s a huuuge gulf of difference between my point about praising platform stability and yours about saying newer languages would never get change to prove themselves. Actually what’s happening right now with Rust being trialed for Linux kernel development, which I’ve acknowledged when I said I hope Rust turns out to be more than a passing fad.
lerno 5y ago
To me this says that C got a lot of things right. I've noticed that even things people complain about, like the somewhat arcane promotion rules to "int" makes perfect sense given the constraints and the expected type sizes. It's not until now that this is somewhat breaking, and that's because with 64 bits `int` didn't follow the normal trend of being register sized.

jarcane 5y ago

A language cannot "survive the next 50 years" if people are too hidebound to refuse to let go of the current 50 year old language. You are asking for the equivalent of those job listings that demand "10+ years experience" in a tech that's only been out for 5.

laumars 5y ago
You’re being rather unfair with your interpretation of my post there. I’ve clearly demonstrated in my writing that I’m in favour of other languages growing. There’s a huuuge gulf of difference between my point about praising platform stability and yours about saying newer languages would never get change to prove themselves. Actually what’s happening right now with Rust being trialed for Linux kernel development, which I’ve acknowledged when I said I hope Rust turns out to be more than a passing fad.

lerno 5y ago

To me this says that C got a lot of things right. I've noticed that even things people complain about, like the somewhat arcane promotion rules to "int" makes perfect sense given the constraints and the expected type sizes. It's not until now that this is somewhat breaking, and that's because with 64 bits `int` didn't follow the normal trend of being register sized.