4 ms·
This looks like a pretty good summary. The stylistic way it's written as if about a 'foreign' language sure makes me feel old though. Twenty years ago, this was
by benched 13y ago
This looks like a pretty good summary. The stylistic way it's written as if about a 'foreign' language sure makes me feel old though. Twenty years ago, this was completely normal. When I went to work, the code was this. This is what there was. It wasn't "low level" or esoteric - just a nice language to feed through the compiler to get executable code.
- adinb 13y agoYes! It makes me feel like my entire CS education (early 90's) was one long hazing ritual with grad students and professors laughing at us in the backroom...while we're busy trying to fix one-off indirect pointer errors.
- laichzeit0 13y agovalgrind / gdb should have made this painless, especially for small self-contained uni projects :) I remember being a teaching assistant for some C++ courses while being a student and the "Are you a wizard?" expression on the undergrads faces when I'd recompile their segfaulting app with debug, run gdb and tell them exacly which line was causing the problem.
- sehugg 13y agoI went straight from Apple BASIC, FORTH, and 6502 assembler to Turbo Pascal, and C seemed esoteric to me at first, and even unneccessary -- compared to Turbo Pascal that is. Then when DOOM was released compiled with Watcom C, I realized this 32-bit C compiler thing was a big deal.
- pjmlp 13y agoWhat baffles me is that this is the type of coding young developers associate with C and C++, whereas we had lots of options to choose from, as you well list.
- AlexanderDhoore 13y agoSome time ago, I did some Free Pascal programming and was surprised that it was much nicer than C. But C won the war because of Unix OSs, not because it's such a good language.
- oinksoft 13y agoCustomers have been demanding books about the WWW, so book stores have been flooded with titles on whichever garbage-collected language is hot for web development at the moment. Since the dot-com boom, your average novice trying to put food on the table has been unlikely to pick the C title off the shelf when the Java or Ruby book is far more likely to fetch a job in six months. Until recently, the perceived cost of C/C++ tools for mainstream platforms also made the simple Java downloads far more attractive. Just getting started learning to program myself in 2000, I remember Perl and Java were the things, and PHP a year later. I had to go out of my way later on on to learn C.
- philbarr 13y agoYes. In fact in my local Waterstones, where supposedly pay a little more so that the knowledgeable staff can help you, I recently saw a sign for books: "C, C+, C++".
- pjscott 13y agoI remember when peeking and poking were totally normal things that people did. The world is more convenient now, I suppose.