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I like their philosophy, and I like the C language (its a beautiful minimal thing, although there is definite room for improvement). But making software that su
by norswap 14y ago
I like their philosophy, and I like the C language (its a beautiful minimal thing, although there is definite room for improvement). But making software that sucks less in C is still a hard sell.
- slurry 14y agoI like suckless too, and use some of their tools (surf is a godsend for my dying laptop) but I find it interesting they linked to the "Duct Tape Programmer" essay at the bottom. I mean, aren't they doing another kind of opposite to duct tape programming? "Write beautifully clean and minimal C code" seems to me just as detached from "just ship the damn thing!" as doing massively multi-inheritanced templated C++ architecture, albeit in the opposite direction.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- S4M 14y agoI was wondering exactly the same thing, especially after reading "Most hackers actually don’t care much about code quality. Thus, if they get something working which seems to solve a problem, they stick with it.".
- sebcat 14y agoTell me about it. C is great for clearly defined system level programs (I do a lot of layer 2 and 3 networking stuff at work), but take the same language in an environment where the customer doesn't really know what he wants and the guy before you decided that everything should be done as if you're to be the next MegaCorp and you need a lot of fifos, schedulers, DSLs and other fancy stuff everywhere to be as efficient and scalable as possible... C is great, but it does make foot amputation rather easy for some people.
- jfb 14y agoI write a fair amount of video processing and container parsing software, and I wouldn't even think of doing this in any language but C. But for anything else I do -- which is all strictly higher-level, mind -- the bare metal begins to burn a little.