4 ms·

Funny how these 2.0 young bucks consider a C-rewrite extreme, when for many coders is is the lingua franca, the bread and butter. I got started on high-level l

Funny how these 2.0 young bucks consider a C-rewrite extreme, when for many coders is is the lingua franca, the bread and butter. I got started on high-level languages but I've made an effort to get familiar with C because it's small, beautiful, and fast as all hell. Fast is powerful.

gnaritas 18y ago
Speed comes in two forms, execution time and development and maintenance time, C is only good for one of these. Python or Ruby would be better for the other.
- jawngee 18y ago
  Why do you think C is such a maintenance issue?
  - jshen 18y ago
    I like it's well accepted that garbage collection is a huge boon for productivity and stability
    - jawngee 18y ago
      C has a variety of garbage collectors, here's one: http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/ http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/ I wonder if it's really more of an intimidation factor than anything (and I'm not saying this to be a jerk, I am truly curious why people have the perception that C is such a nightmare to maintain).
      - jshen 18y ago
        Are you suggesting that you can be as productive in C as I can be in ruby? If not then you answered your own question. Second, are those garbage collectors widely used in C code and if not why?
      - gnaritas 18y ago
        Again, you're looking at best case. Talk to us when GC is mandatory, not optional, because until then, we'll still have to work with C code that can't be trusted because it may not use a GC. To folks who want higher level languages, CG is not an optional feature, it's a core part of the language.
  - gnaritas 18y ago
    Because it is. It's much easier to blow your foot off in C than in Python or Ruby. I think it's pretty well accepted that scripting languages are far more maintainable than C. Sure you can write maintainable C, but that's best case, I think it's more revealing to look at the worse case.
    - jawngee 18y ago
      Yeah but C's worse case is still better than most of Perl's, PHP's, etc. best cases. Just as an example. I don't disagree, btw, that dynamic languages are easier, but I'm really wondering if C's maintenance is really more of a perception than a reality.
      - gnaritas 18y ago
        That's just an absurd statement. C's worse case is obfuscated garbage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Obfuscated_C_Code_Contest http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Obfuscated_C_Code... that just about no one could read or maintain and you think that's better that Python, PHP, Pearl, or Ruby's best case? Or is it more likely that like most C folk, you're just stuck on execution speed as the only measure of a language or you don't know what maintainability actually means? C's being hard to maintain is not a perception, it's a reality. If C were easy to maintain there wouldn't have been room for scripting languages to exist, everyone would have just kept using C. C is extremely low level and extremely powerful, making it hard to work in and very dangerous. Yes you can do anything with a for loop, but I'd much rather use higher level abstractions like higher order functions, first class functions, objects, continuations, and exceptions and not be able to directly play with memory or pointers because I don't give a crap about the machine, I give a crap about abstracting and solving my problem with the least amount of necessary boilerplate or repetitive code. Look, make it simple, assume for the sake of argument that Python and C have exactly equal execution speed under all circumstances, given that axiom, why would anyone choose C over Python? Which language do you think most people would choose?
        barryfandango 18y ago
- coliveira 18y ago
  People that complain so much about C never had a change to learn it well. Go talk to Linus Torvalds about changing from C anything else....
  - jshen 18y ago
    apples and oranges. Linus writes OS code. Good luck doing your next web 2.0 startup if you write it primarily in C
  - paul 18y ago
    Which parts don't I know well?
  - brlewis 18y ago
    I wrote almost exclusively in C for 12 years. I wrote cgiemail, which was very widely used. Today I would never start a server-side web project in C.
paul 18y ago
Part of knowing a tool is knowing when it's inappropriate. A rewrite in ANY language to "fix" a problem that you don't understand is generally a mistake. Doing things the needlessly complex way doesn't make you a better or manlier programmer. By the way, a lot of these perl and python scripts spend most of their time calling into C libraries anyway, so the performance difference is often negligible.
- barryfandango 18y ago
  Why would you bring manliness into the discussion? Are you suggesting that Perl and Python are somehow manlier? Because I have no idea what that means.
- barryfandango 18y ago
  And unless my knowledge of the Python standard library is way off, the Python standard library is written in Python, not C. That's what all those .py files are in the /lib folder. So python scripts spend most of their time calling into Python libraries. It's true that the interpreter is written in c (c++?,) maybe that's what you were thinking of.

gnaritas 18y ago

Speed comes in two forms, execution time and development and maintenance time, C is only good for one of these. Python or Ruby would be better for the other.

jawngee 18y ago
Why do you think C is such a maintenance issue?
- jshen 18y ago
  I like it's well accepted that garbage collection is a huge boon for productivity and stability
  - jawngee 18y ago
    C has a variety of garbage collectors, here's one: http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/ http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/ I wonder if it's really more of an intimidation factor than anything (and I'm not saying this to be a jerk, I am truly curious why people have the perception that C is such a nightmare to maintain).
    - jshen 18y ago
      Are you suggesting that you can be as productive in C as I can be in ruby? If not then you answered your own question. Second, are those garbage collectors widely used in C code and if not why?
    - gnaritas 18y ago
      Again, you're looking at best case. Talk to us when GC is mandatory, not optional, because until then, we'll still have to work with C code that can't be trusted because it may not use a GC. To folks who want higher level languages, CG is not an optional feature, it's a core part of the language.
- gnaritas 18y ago
  Because it is. It's much easier to blow your foot off in C than in Python or Ruby. I think it's pretty well accepted that scripting languages are far more maintainable than C. Sure you can write maintainable C, but that's best case, I think it's more revealing to look at the worse case.
  - jawngee 18y ago
    Yeah but C's worse case is still better than most of Perl's, PHP's, etc. best cases. Just as an example. I don't disagree, btw, that dynamic languages are easier, but I'm really wondering if C's maintenance is really more of a perception than a reality.
    - gnaritas 18y ago
      That's just an absurd statement. C's worse case is obfuscated garbage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Obfuscated_C_Code_Contest http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Obfuscated_C_Code... that just about no one could read or maintain and you think that's better that Python, PHP, Pearl, or Ruby's best case? Or is it more likely that like most C folk, you're just stuck on execution speed as the only measure of a language or you don't know what maintainability actually means? C's being hard to maintain is not a perception, it's a reality. If C were easy to maintain there wouldn't have been room for scripting languages to exist, everyone would have just kept using C. C is extremely low level and extremely powerful, making it hard to work in and very dangerous. Yes you can do anything with a for loop, but I'd much rather use higher level abstractions like higher order functions, first class functions, objects, continuations, and exceptions and not be able to directly play with memory or pointers because I don't give a crap about the machine, I give a crap about abstracting and solving my problem with the least amount of necessary boilerplate or repetitive code. Look, make it simple, assume for the sake of argument that Python and C have exactly equal execution speed under all circumstances, given that axiom, why would anyone choose C over Python? Which language do you think most people would choose?
      - barryfandango 18y ago
coliveira 18y ago
People that complain so much about C never had a change to learn it well. Go talk to Linus Torvalds about changing from C anything else....
- jshen 18y ago
  apples and oranges. Linus writes OS code. Good luck doing your next web 2.0 startup if you write it primarily in C
- paul 18y ago
  Which parts don't I know well?
- brlewis 18y ago
  I wrote almost exclusively in C for 12 years. I wrote cgiemail, which was very widely used. Today I would never start a server-side web project in C.

paul 18y ago

Part of knowing a tool is knowing when it's inappropriate. A rewrite in ANY language to "fix" a problem that you don't understand is generally a mistake. Doing things the needlessly complex way doesn't make you a better or manlier programmer. By the way, a lot of these perl and python scripts spend most of their time calling into C libraries anyway, so the performance difference is often negligible.

barryfandango 18y ago
Why would you bring manliness into the discussion? Are you suggesting that Perl and Python are somehow manlier? Because I have no idea what that means.
barryfandango 18y ago
And unless my knowledge of the Python standard library is way off, the Python standard library is written in Python, not C. That's what all those .py files are in the /lib folder. So python scripts spend most of their time calling into Python libraries. It's true that the interpreter is written in c (c++?,) maybe that's what you were thinking of.