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Is this becoming a thing now (or maybe it was always a thing), where a language, like Rust, has become popular enough that instead of everyone talking about lea

• spoiler 4y ago
  > they now want to talk about how “simple” and “beautiful” C is for no other reason than signaling how different you are from the zeitgeist? It sounds to me like they keep learning languages with the same illusions and failing to take any lessons between their language exploration escapades. All programming languages suck. It's just about finding the one that sucks the least for you (or your project/business). They made the comparison of RPG characters and mentioned endgame frustrations. In my experience, C is the epitome of endgame frustrations (C++ maybe being worse, depending on codebases you work on); they've just yet to discover that
  • maccard 4y ago
    Disagree on c++. Even if you forego the significant improvements in the last decade then: RAII and templates make it worth not using C anymore. Having to use shoddy macros for a resizeable array is just unreasonable.
    • spoiler 4y ago
      I've written C++ for a long time, and I do agree that the language brings certain improvements over C. I think most people will agree with that. However, C++ can be incredibly frustrating to work with depending on the codebase. Overall, C++ can be great choice, but it often times results in not being due to lack of rigorous discipline by everyone involved on the project. It's a bit philosophical whether that's a problem of the tool or the craftsman, but I think it's usually a bit of both.
    • xedrac 4y ago
      C++ is a monstrosity, but RAII is greatly missed when using C. I'm much more inclined to use Rust these days.
      • maccard 4y ago
        Agreed that it's a monstrosity, but the reality is that much of that monstrosity is hiding subtle background issues that exist in C that people don't talk about. look at the implementation of std::vector, and compare that against most of the home rolled macros that (dangerously) wrap calls to realloc, and tell me which one is the monstrosity! Personally, I'm glad someone else wrote vector and that I don't need to handle that.
        • xedrac 4y ago
          I agree. C is absolutely terrible to use for anything that's not trivial. It may have a simple spec, but you pay dearly for it in code complexity. Its abstraction capabilities are only marginally better than writing straight assembly.
  • t-3 4y ago
    > All programming languages suck. It's just about finding the one that sucks the least for you (or your project/business). Very true, but C is the standard language on *nixes, so it's often the one that sucks less. It also strikes a good balance between mental burden and expressiveness for writing simple programs that aren't so trivial that they're just a shell script or one-liner. Rust is just too ugly and verbose to make it what I reach for to quickly hack out a throwaway utility with.
• atoav 4y ago
  As someone who should like the proposition of C after having read a few books on it I decided to avoid the language if I can. Read: I wanted to like the language, but the deeper I went into it the more I realized that the absolute knowledge of everything needed to wield it is not something that is worth aquiring. I understand most of the historical reasons why certain things in the language are the way they are, but some of those result in really bad ergonomics and counterintuitive behavior. So simple and beautiful is not how I would describe C even if I would love it to be that way.
• lionkor 4y ago
  While I agree, I also have to say that Rust does a lot more than just solve some specific C and C++ issues. It doesnt solve all of them (e.g. logic errors, so if thats 90% of your issues you wont benefit too much), it repeats some design issues of C++ (massive complexity from the start, many ways to do the same thing), and implements a C-like unsafe{} language anyways. If Rust was just C but with strong typing, a borrow checker and what would basically be suoer strong static analysis of pairing malloc() and free(), people would likely switch immediately. But it isnt - its a whole different beast which by far is not perfect and repeats many issues it didnt need to repeat (e.g. terrible async like python). Its just so good at having a compiler that tells you whats wrong that most of the other things are not that bad, and switching to Rust is likely good for 80%+ of C projects.
  • Ygg2 4y ago
    > But it isnt - its a whole different beast which by far is not perfect and repeats many issues it didnt need to repeat (e.g. terrible async like python). Not gonna lie, I don't see too much value in async, but that said, I can see where they (the Rust devs) are coming from. It was an oft requested feature, and it was in the pipeline for ages, leading to Rust dev burnout. That said Rust team is working on making it fully usable, albeit the space of efficient, zero-cost abstraction closures that work with lifetimes is a set of one language - Rust.
    • Ygg2 4y ago
      Not closures - async runtime.
  • flohofwoe 4y ago
    > If Rust was just C but with strong typing, a borrow checker and what would basically be super strong static analysis of pairing malloc() and free(), people would likely switch immediately. This is in a nutshell why I haven't switched to Rust. All I actually want is a small language like C, Go or Zig, but with compile time memory safety guarantees. Even if it means that a lot of 'dangerous' flexibility is removed or in an unsafe{} block (essentially a Rust--). IMHO one problem with Rust is that it is moving too quickly into too many different directions, and as a result becoming a 'kitchen-sink language' in the tradition of C++.
• raverbashing 4y ago
  Yeah I agree These people (with rare exceptions) quite funnily never seem to have shipped some actual product or service based on those "simpler" languages. Or if they have it's shipping their parallel implementations of basic services that every language does better than C like strings, slices, data structures, etc. And no, if your code depends on cpp macro magic, it is not helping your point.
• flohofwoe 4y ago
  I'm a programmer since the early 90's, but I have seen this problem only ever with Rust so far (where people are eager to learn something new, pick Rust, and then quickly get jaded - case in point, that's also me - I learned enough Rust to write a home computer emulator but in the process realised that it is not the right language for me, even though it should be from its feature set). It feels a bit like a speed run of C++, at least this took around 2 decades for people to get fed up and turn away ;) (and interestingly, I also switched back to 'mostly C' for my hobby stuff, and I'm quite happy with it)
  • camgunz 4y ago
    > It feels a bit like a speed run of C++ I've felt that way too, and it's been enough to push me away even as I've tried to build things in Rust in earnest. Along the same lines, I've found it hard to say exactly why I like C and super dislike C++. I guess I have to say it's simplicity--like I won't argue C is by itself simple (integer promotion by itself is not simple) but it's definitely simpler than C++, and the simplicity and power of its core conceit (everything is a number) is just enrapturing. I think it's just an ethos thing: Rust doesn't strive to be simple and I find that makes it impossible for it to delight me. I also think that's broadly why newer languages have failed to capture the je ne sais quoi of C: you really can't get away with "everything is a number" these days.
    • oconnor663 4y ago
      > everything is a number I don't think C consistently lives up to this principle: - In the memory model, even simple integers can hold "poison" values. - Pointers usually behave like integer addresses, but in the memory model they have "provenance" (edit: spelling), and they also have to follow "strict aliasing" rules. - Signed integer overflow is UB. We could ignore integer promotion rules most of the time, if not for this restriction. - Even simple integer assignment isn't simple when an integer is shared between threads. Atomic orderings are hilariously complicated. I worry that a lot of people who find delight in C just...aren't aware of these rules? Or maybe aren't consistently aware? Or maybe are aware but think that some violations are benign?
• ChrisRR 4y ago
  I'm a C programmer by day and I disagree with them, C is only simple if you're trying to do simple tasks with it. The very common thing I want to use in C is some sort of variable size string object. But no, I have to dynamically allocate a buffer that I know will be at least the right size for any text I ever put into it, or do I create a buffer that's the correct size for that string but re-alloc if I ever change it to a longer string. But then how do I store the buffer size? Do I want to create a struct that constains a point to the buffer and the length, or use sizeof() to calculate the string length? But then I can't use sizeof() if I pass that buffer into a function via a pointer. If I pass that string to a function is it being copied straight away or just storing the pointer so I can't change the string at a later date. I can't enforce copy semantics And god forbid you ever forget to include space for the NULL I just want a string I can dump some text in, I don't want to go searching for libraries, I don't want to have to consider allocation and copying and all that crap. If I wrote half of my boilerplate C code in python it would look just as simple and beautiful (if not more)
  • ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    >I'm a C programmer by day and I disagree with them, C is only simple if you're trying to do simple tasks with it. C gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot. And rightfully so. It came out in a time when everyone was coding assembly. It's meant not to hold you back from doing voodoo with low-level stuff, therefore it won't hold your hand. Not very practical in the world of today when we've been spoiled by 'better' languages and you need to quickly ship stuff that mostly works without worrying about the little things, but at the time it was revolutionary.
    • flohofwoe 4y ago
      > when everyone was coding assembly.. This was before my time, but I think it's a common misconception (only true for operating system development). When C was created, there was already Lisp, Cobol, Fortran, Algol, Simula, BASIC... and SmallTalk and Prolog were just around the corner - and most of those are much higher level than C).
• pulse7 4y ago
  Maybe the zeitgeist is "being different from others for no reason"...
  • hnarn 4y ago
    That’s a very good point.
  • version_five 4y ago
    I started a side project in C earlier this year, and now I'm a little upset at the prospect that doing that is going to be seen as some hipster niche. I felt the same way when everyone started growing beards.
• scoutt 4y ago
  > Is this becoming a thing now Maybe we are entering an era where C is cool again!
  • Ygg2 4y ago
    I doubt it, even NSA is against C. Guess they got tired of all the null pointer vulnerabilities.
  • hnarn 4y ago
    Maybe it will intersect with the year of the Linux desktop :-)
• coldtea 4y ago
  >they now want to talk about how “simple” and “beautiful” C is for no other reason than signaling how different you are from the zeitgeist? Given that this has been an argument for 3 decades or so, e.g. compared to C++ especially, I don't think so. Even more so since C is not just some trendy language you pick up quickly, but needs quite a lot of time and effort to be profficcient in, to the point of appreciating its simplicity and portability/stability/etc benefits. >Rust exists for a reason, and it solves specific problems. Rust exists because its creators had a reason such a language was needed in mind. Doesn't mean others necessarily share it, or if they do, that they see Rust as the solution to the problem behind that reason.
  • jacquesm 4y ago
    I think the main mistake that the Rust people made in their initial promotion of the language was to position it as 'a replacement for C'. No programming language has ever replaced another completely, it always ended up as just another language with its own trade offs and quirks. This even holds within a single language eco system if it isn't managed carefully, Python comes to mind.
• throwntoday 4y ago
  > Rust exists for a reason, and it solves specific problems. But if say the foundation that supports it's development were to try asserting draconian control over it, many may reasonably be turned off. I'll stick to C/C++ personally, rust does seem less flavor of the month but I can't get behind it if it's clear there are nutjobs at the helm.
• up2isomorphism 4y ago
  Only when a certain language community tries to promote itself as a “better” C and thinking all C code should be converted and then some people actually tried and do not agree with it. Just write programs with your favorite language, if it is actually a “better “ one it will win, and you don’t annoy yourself and others by over promoting it. C did not start by building a evangelical strike force but bunch of programmers that actually wrote software that people have to use.
• tpoacher 4y ago
  If there's a "hipster" notion here it's not that of choosing C as rebellion against Rust, but that choosing C constitutes a rebellion against Rust and only Rust, as if it's the only systems programming language worth it's salt. E.g., explain to me like I'm 10 why you think Rust is better than, say, D.
  • shrimp_emoji 4y ago
    It seems to me like D is like if you took the most complicated language in the world, C++, and did even more stuff to it, like adding in an optional garbage collector. One reason it's so complicated is that "low level" programming plus OOP seem to be a terrible mix. D is trying to improve a messy room by re-organizing some things and introducing a Roomba. Rust blazes a whole new path, with the slightly different objective of safety. It's simple and lean, almost like C. It bakes in lessons learned over the years like inheritance being overly complicated, OOP generally being overly complicated, and how dangerous systems programming can be by having modules instead of classes, composition instead of inheritance, and memory safety as a default. It also broke the false dichotomy of "fast but dangerously leaky" or "slow but safely garbage collected" by introducing borrow checking and move semantics, allowing speed and safety with no garbage collection. D feels like a continuation down an evolutionary dead end, like teleputer cartridges in Infinite Jest. Rust feels like an innovative fresh start, like transferring digital DRM-free files. (If you think that makes D sound charming, I agree. But realistically I would stick with Rust. :p)
    • tpoacher 4y ago
      I won't lie, I lol'ed at the Roomba bit :D