5 ms·

This is what C/C++ haters, anti x86/amd64 snobs, and Rust elitists always forget: what works, works. Sure, it could be a local maximum, hopefully there will b

• pjmlp 4y ago
  Some of us are old enough to be coding when C was only relevant for university departments privileged to have UNIX boxes. So we know there are other ways, we used systems with zero lines of C into them. The prom queen came naked offering herself to everyone and the party was done for the other folks.
  • asguy 4y ago
    That excuse sounds like the guy in highschool who would have treated the girl so much better, but she was into assholes. If you are old enough to remember those days, then you remember COBOL, Algol, Fortran, Pascal, BASIC, Ada, Oberon, Lisp/Scheme, Forth, O’Caml etc. They’re all great languages, some still have their uses. There’s a reason all of the major operating systems have cores written in C/C++. It’s entirely because they’re pragmatic and “work”, and not some conspiracy. Edit: although now that I write it, what if C/C++ was planted on earth by an alien intelligence in order to slow down the development of the human race.
    • pjmlp 4y ago
      The power of free beer with source tapes is very mighty. Thankfully governments have finally start paying attention regarding software liability.
      • WalterBright 4y ago
        > Thankfully governments have finally start paying attention regarding software liability. And we'll see a great slowdown in the software industry.
        • pjmlp 4y ago
          When people buy damaged goods, they ask for a refund, they don't expect to close and reopen the box and have the product reappear in perfect shape. The industry has miseducated them, and now it is finally happening, software products aren't a special snowflake. Digital stores with returns, consulting contracts with warranty clauses with fixes at the expense of provider, and naturally cyber security bills. Move fast and break things only works due to lack of liability.
          • nickpp 4y ago
            A strong, competitive free market naturally selects what people value the most. Because there is no black and white - most decisions are tradeoffs between cost, difficulty, time, convenience, safety, functionality, and so on. Government regulations practically place an infinity price on selected characteristics. The result is less entrants in the market, less competition and naturally worse results across all parameters.
            • pjmlp 4y ago
              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed
        • im3w1l 4y ago
          For every year the industry becomes more mature. And with maturity comes less need for speedy innovation, and higher need for quality and reliability. It may happen in five years or in twenty, but it seems almost certain that it must happen.
          • WalterBright 4y ago
            Software naturally grows more reliable every year. Government intervention won't improve things.
            • pjmlp 4y ago
  • saagarjha 4y ago
    I don't think this analogy needs continuing.
• Oxidation 4y ago
  It doesn't even have to be a local maximum, just higher up some hillside will do (maybe it's even on a different hillside to the one you're on at the moment).
• mariosisters 4y ago
  Nailed it with this quote, especially because it scales to all levels of product development. Literally the only thing that matters (in the context of business success, of course) is if it works enough to keep going up and the the right. No one cares about your code.
  • rcoveson 4y ago
    > ...is if it works enough to keep going up and the the right. Right, because that's a one-bit truth value, not a scalar. The slope doesn't matter, it just has to be positive. Everything is so simple! There's no such thing as high margins, or success in degrees. Is there something adding friction to the process of making software/food/cars? Well, is it adding enough friction to make our profits go negative? No? Then literally no one cares.
    • mariosisters 4y ago
      The one bit value of growing vs not is the primary determinant of success (in this industry), yes. I’m not making a lifestyle biz.
      • rcoveson 4y ago
        With your philosophy that literally reduces engineering to “does it make any profit at all true or false”, I would hope that you would confine yourself to the lifestyle industry.
  • kilgnad 4y ago
    Code matters, it's hidden technical debt that bites you in the ass later, kind of like contracting HIV. Guess where I'm taking that prom queen analogy
  • bitwize 4y ago
    John Ousterhout put it like: Not working to working is the biggest performance improvement. No misogyny needed.
• kilgnad 4y ago
  The prom queen fucked the only thing that was available. Nowadays the prom queen has tinder, loads of competing options and is woke.
  • HWR_14 4y ago
    Unless you went to a very small school, the prom queen always had lots of options. That's the point of the quote. Tinder is irrelevant. The winners are the people who eventually she chooses. As for "is woke", I have no idea how to read that point.
    • kilgnad 4y ago
      >Unless you went to a very small school, the prom queen always had lots of options. No, C was really the only available systems options. C and C++. >Tinder is irrelevant. The winners are the people who eventually she chooses. In the dating market today, tinder has created essentially a shit show for males. With that much choice and selection female hypegamy becomes expressed to the max. The top 80% of the top females match with the top 20% of males; It has never been this way for most of humanity. Even the top female always had a limited pool to choose from and her feelings would naturally calibrate to that fact. With tinder everything changed. You get the top tier males having a lot of fun and never settling down, while the rest just give up. That's hook up culture for you. C would NEVER have been chosen if there were more options. >As for "is woke", I have no idea how to read that point. It's the same thing. Wokeness is the result of more womens' rights. Historically, all women couldn't be as selective as they are now because they couldn't hunt for food or work corporate jobs. Survival depended on them finding a man. This is no longer the case and is responsible for much greater female selectivity. Again C succeeded because of very few alternative options and necessity. Anyway I can see why you or other people missed the analogy. You have to be familiar with the modern dating game AND familiar with what programming was like 20-30 years ago. Most people capable of even making the comparison have been out of the game for ages. The state of programming languages that are chosen today is very very much like the hookup culture of today. Especially on the front end, the front end is a woke prom queen for sure.
      • deleted 4y ago
• bitwize 4y ago
  1) Connery's character's attempt to out-chad Cage's character failed because the latter replied: "Carla was the prom queen." 2) The proportion of prom queen fuckers among systems programming experts is probably much lower than among the general population. 3) The real Unix philosophy is a perverse form of "worse is better", i.e., it prefers making it easy to slap together something that kinda sorta works without worrying about "edge cases" that people are likely to run into, over crafting a reasonably complete, responsible solution. C is the result of this philosophy applied to language design. If it hadn't been for Unix becoming ubiquitous, we wouldn't have made that disastrous choice. (Come to think of it, under this rubric, Electron is a Unix philosophy exemplar.)
  • asguy 4y ago
    > 1) Connery's character's attempt to out-chad Cage's character failed because the latter replied: "Carla was the prom queen." Your calibration is off: he wasn’t trying to put-Chad him.. he was telling him to “git gud”