4 ms·

I appreciate the sentiment, but: - there doesn't have to be "two kinds". Trivially you can fit both "types" at once, I certainly feel that way. And if there ar

by fargle 4y ago

I appreciate the sentiment, but: - there doesn't have to be "two kinds". Trivially you can fit both "types" at once, I certainly feel that way. And if there are 100 programmers, there'd be about 237 other reasons to use a language. False dichotomy. - a better categorization might be "there are two kinds of C programmers: those who eventually start using rust and those that don't." which is at least of course absolutely true. - I dislike the idea that a programmer is bound to a language. He's a "C" programmer, She's a LISP person, etc. A good software engineer should use about 5-10 different languages appropriate for the purpose at hand.

eqvinox 4y ago
> I dislike the idea that a programmer is bound to a language. He's a "C" programmer, […] Nothing in the article suggests that being a "C programmer" is that kind of a binding label. It's you reading that into it ;). (Though certainly influenced by the fact that that is a widespread interpretation.) FWIW, I consider myself a C programmer, and in both camps presented in that article. But I'm also a Python programmer, and I don't think either of those two languages "owns" me.
psyklic 4y ago
I disagree that enjoying C automatically means you will like Rust. If you are obsessed with safety, Rust will be a nice solution. But Rust is a much more complex language than C, which will turn many C programmers away.
- unionpivo 4y ago
  But its not really. Sure it seems so when you start. K&R and away you go, that programming is a lot easier than writing rust sure. But unless you are writing for just yourself, no current C software get developed that way. You need to understand C standard, that is quite complex and you need to understand it in detail because of undefined behavior (and of course how your compiler interprets it and sometimes fight with compiler to emit right code). Then you needed to know all the gotchas in the standard library, and how you properly use them. Then you need to know how to do basic arithmetic without having undefined behavior (that's where a lot of memory leaks happen). Or maybe the software you are working on has created their own implementation of most of those functions, so you need to figure how to use those. Even to just print out a debug statement can sometimes be nontrivial. And of course you need a way to compile the damn thing, just figuring out what sane options you need to use to get decent warnings and what they mean takes a while. And when you figure all of that out, you still need to keep track of most of the stuff that borrow checker does, but this time by hand using comments and conventions (that you also need to learn for each project.) (I left out whole build setup, but its usually harder than Rust one too. ) I believe that programmer who has only programmed java or maybe C# before (or python, js...) will get up too up to speed faster on Rust than on C on most real-world projects C is deceptively simpler.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    C is simpler so long as you avoid "smart" code and stick to simple patterns consistently, like if/goto error cleanup or using libraries to deal with strings. It's not hard, just very tedious. Someone coming from Java or C# would quickly recognize that this is basically doing what they've taken for granted, but manually. Once they do, so long as they have the discipline and patience to stick to this approach, it's not really all that different. GObject is a good example of this kind of C. With Rust, you have to think very differently about how to e.g. structure your data to make the borrow checker happy in many cases. This doesn't really translate to anything similar in other mainstream languages; it's a whole new skill that has to be learned.
- fargle 4y ago
  I think you might not have read my bullet point that mentioned rust very carefully.
atomicnumber3 4y ago
Dunno, I'm a self-professed "java" programmer even though at my current and prior job there is not a single line of Java code. (Current job is golang and python, prior job was python and scala). But many of my side projects are Java and she is always first in my heart no matter where the money takes me.

by fargle 4y ago

eqvinox 4y ago

> I dislike the idea that a programmer is bound to a language. He's a "C" programmer, […] Nothing in the article suggests that being a "C programmer" is that kind of a binding label. It's you reading that into it ;). (Though certainly influenced by the fact that that is a widespread interpretation.) FWIW, I consider myself a C programmer, and in both camps presented in that article. But I'm also a Python programmer, and I don't think either of those two languages "owns" me.

psyklic 4y ago

I disagree that enjoying C automatically means you will like Rust. If you are obsessed with safety, Rust will be a nice solution. But Rust is a much more complex language than C, which will turn many C programmers away.

unionpivo 4y ago
But its not really. Sure it seems so when you start. K&R and away you go, that programming is a lot easier than writing rust sure. But unless you are writing for just yourself, no current C software get developed that way. You need to understand C standard, that is quite complex and you need to understand it in detail because of undefined behavior (and of course how your compiler interprets it and sometimes fight with compiler to emit right code). Then you needed to know all the gotchas in the standard library, and how you properly use them. Then you need to know how to do basic arithmetic without having undefined behavior (that's where a lot of memory leaks happen). Or maybe the software you are working on has created their own implementation of most of those functions, so you need to figure how to use those. Even to just print out a debug statement can sometimes be nontrivial. And of course you need a way to compile the damn thing, just figuring out what sane options you need to use to get decent warnings and what they mean takes a while. And when you figure all of that out, you still need to keep track of most of the stuff that borrow checker does, but this time by hand using comments and conventions (that you also need to learn for each project.) (I left out whole build setup, but its usually harder than Rust one too. ) I believe that programmer who has only programmed java or maybe C# before (or python, js...) will get up too up to speed faster on Rust than on C on most real-world projects C is deceptively simpler.
- int_19h 4y ago
  C is simpler so long as you avoid "smart" code and stick to simple patterns consistently, like if/goto error cleanup or using libraries to deal with strings. It's not hard, just very tedious. Someone coming from Java or C# would quickly recognize that this is basically doing what they've taken for granted, but manually. Once they do, so long as they have the discipline and patience to stick to this approach, it's not really all that different. GObject is a good example of this kind of C. With Rust, you have to think very differently about how to e.g. structure your data to make the borrow checker happy in many cases. This doesn't really translate to anything similar in other mainstream languages; it's a whole new skill that has to be learned.
fargle 4y ago
I think you might not have read my bullet point that mentioned rust very carefully.

atomicnumber3 4y ago

Dunno, I'm a self-professed "java" programmer even though at my current and prior job there is not a single line of Java code. (Current job is golang and python, prior job was python and scala). But many of my side projects are Java and she is always first in my heart no matter where the money takes me.