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Even for 2017, this is extremely late thinking. Back in '10 it was clear the consumer desktop was dying a rapid death. Now professional and business software ar

Even for 2017, this is extremely late thinking. Back in '10 it was clear the consumer desktop was dying a rapid death. Now professional and business software are going the same way, and it is no wonder because nobody respects desktop development anymore. The advent of tools like Cosmopolatan libc are looking too late and too "hard" for new developers to catch on, so far...

d3nj4l 5y ago
Re: cosmopolitan libc: As cool as it is, I don't think the barrier to widespread adoption of C as a greenfield language for application development was ever that things didn't run cross-platform, it was, you know, the footguns and complexity of building anything significant in C.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  I don't know how old you are, but at 57 and having been "computing" for 35 years, I'd say that this is wrong, on two levels. 1. C has been the green field language for application for decades. 2. The major obstacle is precisely cross-platform development; without a fairly thick layer to abstract away the OS API/platform, it's very difficult. In addition to those two, there's the detail that lots of development projects want in-browser capabilities, and that essentially rules out compiled languages (ignoring the developing options for webasm, even though they still do not take it as far as native C/C++).
  - dannyw 5y ago
    I'm a developer in my mid 20s with a few friends who are software engineers. None of them worked with C for years. The jobs here are JavaScript, Java, Python, etc.
    - jcelerier 5y ago
      Depends on where you live I guess ? When I was in Bordeaux there were almost as many c/c++ jobs than java/php/js jobs, and more than Python jobs.
    - bsenftner 5y ago
      The modern reality is that most, 99.99%, of all software does not need the performance nor engineering flexibility that is C/C++. couple that with multiple generations of new developers being told "memory management is too hard for your poor little brains" and similar bullshit - nowadays it is rare to find a young developer that is not downright afraid of C/C++. Plus, the greybeard C/C++ guru is not at all helpful in many locations, having been corporate abused for decades at this point...
saagarjha 5y ago
Cosmopolitan libc is fun as a toy but not something you can ship software on. Its design is just fundamentally disconnected from how operating systems work today.

d3nj4l 5y ago

Re: cosmopolitan libc: As cool as it is, I don't think the barrier to widespread adoption of C as a greenfield language for application development was ever that things didn't run cross-platform, it was, you know, the footguns and complexity of building anything significant in C.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
I don't know how old you are, but at 57 and having been "computing" for 35 years, I'd say that this is wrong, on two levels. 1. C has been the green field language for application for decades. 2. The major obstacle is precisely cross-platform development; without a fairly thick layer to abstract away the OS API/platform, it's very difficult. In addition to those two, there's the detail that lots of development projects want in-browser capabilities, and that essentially rules out compiled languages (ignoring the developing options for webasm, even though they still do not take it as far as native C/C++).
- dannyw 5y ago
  I'm a developer in my mid 20s with a few friends who are software engineers. None of them worked with C for years. The jobs here are JavaScript, Java, Python, etc.
  - jcelerier 5y ago
    Depends on where you live I guess ? When I was in Bordeaux there were almost as many c/c++ jobs than java/php/js jobs, and more than Python jobs.
  - bsenftner 5y ago
    The modern reality is that most, 99.99%, of all software does not need the performance nor engineering flexibility that is C/C++. couple that with multiple generations of new developers being told "memory management is too hard for your poor little brains" and similar bullshit - nowadays it is rare to find a young developer that is not downright afraid of C/C++. Plus, the greybeard C/C++ guru is not at all helpful in many locations, having been corporate abused for decades at this point...

saagarjha 5y ago

Cosmopolitan libc is fun as a toy but not something you can ship software on. Its design is just fundamentally disconnected from how operating systems work today.