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I doubt that the tech industry will ever move completely away from C. (I had a friend who was doing graduate work in physics and he was required to do all his w

by bitops 15y ago

I doubt that the tech industry will ever move completely away from C. (I had a friend who was doing graduate work in physics and he was required to do all his work in Fortran, believe it or not, so old languages do stick around). For "mainstream" (read: enterprise) software, yes, C may fall out of favor, but it's a great language and here to stay. There are just too many cases where C is the right tool for the right job and it would be silly to use a different language. I'm thinking particularly of embedded software. While languages like Lua are great for embedded scripting, they still need something to script against. So, C isn't going anywhere and I expect that 100 years from now it will still be a worthwhile language to program in. (Also, C is very much the Latin of modern programming. Learning it helps your understanding of so many other things. In case you're curious, Lisp is Greek and I mean that affectionately).

tptacek 15y ago
You think in 100 years we'll be writing in a language whose only real data type is an integer, overloaded to represent human language, memory addresses, and (by extension) the identities of functions? What a depressing thought. I love writing C code (the model of programming where virtually anything is possible by modifying and reinterpreting integers is often a fun one), and it's my best language, but I hope we grow out of it sooner than later.
- yew 15y ago
  C will go away alongside modern hardware design "standards." Until that happens someone will always find a use for talking as directly as possible to the hardware (which, of course, doesn't care about types at all). Whether that'll take a hundred years, or a thousand, or ten I don't know. Of course it's possible to write a lot of things in, say, Python, then rewrite the slow bits in C. The number of programs that absolutely must be written close to the metal is pretty small in absolute terms.
- statictype 15y ago
  As long as we're running our software on a Von Neumann machine, there will be a need for a language which is just a thin layer on top of it. Considering we already have one, it seems hard to believe that it will go away without a fundamental change in how computers work. (Which is not to say we won't have better languages - just that we will always have the bare-metal one as well)
cpeterso 15y ago
> C isn't going anywhere and I expect that 100 years from now it will still be a worthwhile language to program in. I often wonder what a more radical evolution of C might look like. What will "ISO C[20]99" look like? gcc has many clever compiler warnings, but a safer superset/subset language that is mostly source compatible might be valuable.

by bitops 15y ago

tptacek 15y ago

You think in 100 years we'll be writing in a language whose only real data type is an integer, overloaded to represent human language, memory addresses, and (by extension) the identities of functions? What a depressing thought. I love writing C code (the model of programming where virtually anything is possible by modifying and reinterpreting integers is often a fun one), and it's my best language, but I hope we grow out of it sooner than later.

yew 15y ago
C will go away alongside modern hardware design "standards." Until that happens someone will always find a use for talking as directly as possible to the hardware (which, of course, doesn't care about types at all). Whether that'll take a hundred years, or a thousand, or ten I don't know. Of course it's possible to write a lot of things in, say, Python, then rewrite the slow bits in C. The number of programs that absolutely must be written close to the metal is pretty small in absolute terms.
statictype 15y ago
As long as we're running our software on a Von Neumann machine, there will be a need for a language which is just a thin layer on top of it. Considering we already have one, it seems hard to believe that it will go away without a fundamental change in how computers work. (Which is not to say we won't have better languages - just that we will always have the bare-metal one as well)

cpeterso 15y ago

> C isn't going anywhere and I expect that 100 years from now it will still be a worthwhile language to program in. I often wonder what a more radical evolution of C might look like. What will "ISO C[20]99" look like? gcc has many clever compiler warnings, but a safer superset/subset language that is mostly source compatible might be valuable.