7 ms·

30 years of C

101 points by pragmatic 17y ago

coliveira 17y ago
I like this part: "Template meta-programming is a great example of people being clever without being responsible."
fogus 17y ago
" When I worked for Apple a few years later I was dismayed that it was a Pascal shop..." I never knew this, interesting tidbit. Like many programmers I've read my share of Apple history books, but somehow Apple Pascal eluded me.
- cesare 17y ago
  Yep. Much of the original Mac OS was written in Pascal. I still have a boxed copy of Symantec Think Pascal. I used it to make my first steps in window based/event driven applications programming on the Mac (in 1990). I remember coding my first apps invoking the system calls directly to create windows, handling events (see where the user clicked) etc. Then I moved to Codeworrior which had a nice c++ framework.
  - drewr 17y ago
    If my high school CS teacher had told me that Mac OS had been written in Pascal, I would have been slightly more enthused about learning it. I had a similar, nebulous unease with it as dadhacker and really enjoyed C when I got to college.
    - cesare 17y ago
      I dropped out of college (CS) instead, also because of an episode related to this. An assignment for an exam was to make a simple library management program in pascal (cataloging books, leading, receiving them back etc.), mainly to test our understanding of pointers. Even if we also had Macs at the university, we've been asked to make a command line app. But, since I was studying the Mac OS gui programming by myself, I made a graphical application instead. The assistant professor that was evaluatings our assignment didn't believe that I had made it myself. She probably couldn't understand it herself (but, obviously, all the relevant functions were separated from the gui code). So she asked me to rewrite everything from scratch as a command line application in a couple of hours in front of her. I managed to do it but I was really really pissed off. Shortly thereafter I started working and dropped out.
      - theli0nheart 17y ago
        What's incredible is that a lot of the time, GUI-based applications are only a smidgen more complicated than their command-line counterparts. Sad that your professor didn't seem to know this.
        DrJokepu 17y ago
        as he mentionned, this happened 17 years ago. While I never programmed the original Mac OS, I know that Win16 GUI programming wasn't the simplest thing ever at all - it was considerably more complicated that parsing a command line; you had to deal with message queues, pass pointers around with no nice OO interfaces.
      - barrkel 17y ago
        You ignored the requirements and demonstrated expertise in the wrong area, IMO. In a similar situation, I wrote the required command-line app, but it handled queries, basically parsing to an expression tree predicate. Of course, it doesn't matter now.
        cesare 17y ago
        > You ignored the requirements and demonstrated expertise in the wrong area, IMO. The assignment was about implementing the functionalities of a simple library management app. And it was explicitly to test using pointers, linked lists ecc. The requirements were fully implemented. And all the queries were handled by functions which were completely separated from the gui code. Basically, instead of a textual menu (1 - borrow, 2 - return etc.) you had a Mac Os menu and the results were presented inside fields in a window instead of a textual output. If I had to convert the program to a textual interface by editing my source (instead of doing everything from scratch) it would have took me 5 minutes (or less). IIRC the code was already there and simply commented out. Keep also in mind that our lab was full of Macs (50-60 machines) with just a PC (which, btw, has been used by a guy who had made the app with his own advanced textual interface - something like ncurses - and who had a similar fate as mine). So I thought it was a plus to use the native gui of the OS we were using all the time. > Of course, it doesn't matter now. Of course. It happened 17 years ago :-)
  - billswift 17y ago
    You might want to reread the part of the post on the importance of spelling. I am not familiar with program names - is that supposed to be Codeworrier or Codewarrior, or am I wrong and it's spelled correctly.
    - cesare 17y ago
      Yes it's spelled Codewarrior. Sorry.
  - cesare 17y ago
    s/Codeworrior/Codewarrior/g
- huhtenberg 17y ago
  Ever wondered why almost all of Win32 API is __stdcall ? :)
awolf 17y ago
"Don’t leave unused code hanging around because it might be useful someday. If it’s not being used right now, remove it, because even just sitting there it’s costing you." Couldn't agree more - every extra line makes the source code that much harder to wrap your brain around. If I glance at a section in my code and can't instantly grasp what it is doing and how it fits into the bigger picture then I know I still have refactoring to do.
- DarkShikari 17y ago
  And version control keeps it around for you anyways. I can't even count the number of times I've heard "but this code will be useful if/when we add support for feature X" used to justify hundreds or even thousands of lines of ifdeffed-out cruft.
  - sunkencity 17y ago
    I worked with someone who never threw old code away. It was amusingly difficult to try to understand what his code did. Typically shitloads of php files that didn't do anything and in the files that actually did something stuff like if (false) { ... large incomprehensible code block .. } was common. Why comment out stuff when you can just disable it programmatically?
    - davidw 17y ago
      I did some work at a place where they had a PHP class called something like "foobar_2004_08". Given that it was 2006, I asked about axing it, but was told it was still in use. Shudder
    - theli0nheart 17y ago
      Ugh, makes me sick to my stomach.
    - scotty79 17y ago
      The cause could be that inside the block there were already the /* */ comments, and editor did not have single keystroke option to add // at the beginning of each selected line.
ivankirigin 17y ago
I "know" C. But are there any good resources on learning to build real systems in C? I don't like C++.
- nkurz 17y ago
  I've found some books like Maguire's "Writing Solid Code" and McConnell's "Code Complete" to be helpful, but your best resources are probably the source code to systems similar to your definition of 'real'. Depending on this definition, I'd suggest looking at the source for SQLite (compact and rock solid), Apache (customizable request handling), Perl (for polymorphic data types), and Linux (a big modular system). Basically, pick any of the open source tools you use, and see how they've solved the problem you are interested in!
- wooby 17y ago
  The best resource I've found was "The Unix Programming Environment," which goes beyond the C language and into using common libraries and organizing C projects with make and other tools. Other than that, some food for thought on use of C in the real world is this article by Rob Pike, "Notes on Programming in C:" http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/pikestyle.html http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/pikestyle.html
- sunkencity 17y ago
  Look at successful open source projects and read the source.
  - silentbicycle 17y ago
    Some successful open source projects have dreadful source, though. There are several threads on HN recommending source to read. (Off the top of my head, I'd recommend the source for Lua and OpenBSD's userland utilities.)
    - thamer 17y ago
      Lua is often recommended, but the one I've seen the most praise for is SQLite.
cturner 17y ago
can’t help but think that Sun continued to blow its opportunities here, for years. Usually I jump on the bash-java bandwagon. However, I think the author's wrong about this. Java is good in a team setting, and Java is the best choice for the enterprise. I support a cross-platform, plugin-oriented Java application with a large install base and wouldn't want it written in anything else. In C applications, it happens that applications will have segfaults, and threaded log less helpfully on the way down whereas in java there's a command that allows you to analyse threads of a running process. When there's a Java problem I have much better odds of getting my head around the source than I would for the sort of macro-affected C source that you'd need for an application run in this setting. If it were to run out of memory it would be clear about it. When you're stuck with libraries where the source and developers are long gone it's realistic to use a decompiler. With some preparation at dev time you can use the classpath and classloaders to hot-patch. C is good for programmers, but not so good for the other technical workers. And I don't think C is as much of a big deal as it used to be due to the advances in scripting languages. I do a fair bit of programming oriented around unix system calls, all in python. Sometimes I find the documentation is better in C, and mock it up there, and then carry it back to python where I can do more with it. Also, if you're on Bigco's standard-issue Solaris host you're far more likely to find perl than a C compiler. Computers are faster than they used to be. Raw execution speed and memory footprint of a process (areas where C is stronger) are much less relevant to scale issues than they used to be. Reply said: The author is comparing Java to C#, not C. Er - ah - so he did. Thanks for being polite about it.
- arohner 17y ago
  The author is comparing Java to C#, not C.
- kabdib 17y ago
  If it matters, I happen to agree with you, as what you said holds true for Java-vs-C as well as for C#-vs-C. For Java-vs-C#, I hold my ground :-) I tend to hack up Perl-like tools in C# these days, using a small regexp-centric framework that also handles command line parsing. It's not much more code, and I feel better about it in my current community.

101 points by pragmatic 17y ago

I like this part: "Template meta-programming is a great example of people being clever without being responsible."

fogus 17y ago

" When I worked for Apple a few years later I was dismayed that it was a Pascal shop..." I never knew this, interesting tidbit. Like many programmers I've read my share of Apple history books, but somehow Apple Pascal eluded me.

cesare 17y ago
Yep. Much of the original Mac OS was written in Pascal. I still have a boxed copy of Symantec Think Pascal. I used it to make my first steps in window based/event driven applications programming on the Mac (in 1990). I remember coding my first apps invoking the system calls directly to create windows, handling events (see where the user clicked) etc. Then I moved to Codeworrior which had a nice c++ framework.
- drewr 17y ago
  If my high school CS teacher had told me that Mac OS had been written in Pascal, I would have been slightly more enthused about learning it. I had a similar, nebulous unease with it as dadhacker and really enjoyed C when I got to college.
  - cesare 17y ago
    I dropped out of college (CS) instead, also because of an episode related to this. An assignment for an exam was to make a simple library management program in pascal (cataloging books, leading, receiving them back etc.), mainly to test our understanding of pointers. Even if we also had Macs at the university, we've been asked to make a command line app. But, since I was studying the Mac OS gui programming by myself, I made a graphical application instead. The assistant professor that was evaluatings our assignment didn't believe that I had made it myself. She probably couldn't understand it herself (but, obviously, all the relevant functions were separated from the gui code). So she asked me to rewrite everything from scratch as a command line application in a couple of hours in front of her. I managed to do it but I was really really pissed off. Shortly thereafter I started working and dropped out.
    - theli0nheart 17y ago
      What's incredible is that a lot of the time, GUI-based applications are only a smidgen more complicated than their command-line counterparts. Sad that your professor didn't seem to know this.
      - DrJokepu 17y ago
        as he mentionned, this happened 17 years ago. While I never programmed the original Mac OS, I know that Win16 GUI programming wasn't the simplest thing ever at all - it was considerably more complicated that parsing a command line; you had to deal with message queues, pass pointers around with no nice OO interfaces.
    - barrkel 17y ago
      You ignored the requirements and demonstrated expertise in the wrong area, IMO. In a similar situation, I wrote the required command-line app, but it handled queries, basically parsing to an expression tree predicate. Of course, it doesn't matter now.
      - cesare 17y ago
        > You ignored the requirements and demonstrated expertise in the wrong area, IMO. The assignment was about implementing the functionalities of a simple library management app. And it was explicitly to test using pointers, linked lists ecc. The requirements were fully implemented. And all the queries were handled by functions which were completely separated from the gui code. Basically, instead of a textual menu (1 - borrow, 2 - return etc.) you had a Mac Os menu and the results were presented inside fields in a window instead of a textual output. If I had to convert the program to a textual interface by editing my source (instead of doing everything from scratch) it would have took me 5 minutes (or less). IIRC the code was already there and simply commented out. Keep also in mind that our lab was full of Macs (50-60 machines) with just a PC (which, btw, has been used by a guy who had made the app with his own advanced textual interface - something like ncurses - and who had a similar fate as mine). So I thought it was a plus to use the native gui of the OS we were using all the time. > Of course, it doesn't matter now. Of course. It happened 17 years ago :-)
- billswift 17y ago
  You might want to reread the part of the post on the importance of spelling. I am not familiar with program names - is that supposed to be Codeworrier or Codewarrior, or am I wrong and it's spelled correctly.
  - cesare 17y ago
    Yes it's spelled Codewarrior. Sorry.
- cesare 17y ago
  s/Codeworrior/Codewarrior/g
huhtenberg 17y ago
Ever wondered why almost all of Win32 API is __stdcall ? :)

awolf 17y ago

"Don’t leave unused code hanging around because it might be useful someday. If it’s not being used right now, remove it, because even just sitting there it’s costing you." Couldn't agree more - every extra line makes the source code that much harder to wrap your brain around. If I glance at a section in my code and can't instantly grasp what it is doing and how it fits into the bigger picture then I know I still have refactoring to do.

DarkShikari 17y ago
And version control keeps it around for you anyways. I can't even count the number of times I've heard "but this code will be useful if/when we add support for feature X" used to justify hundreds or even thousands of lines of ifdeffed-out cruft.
- sunkencity 17y ago
  I worked with someone who never threw old code away. It was amusingly difficult to try to understand what his code did. Typically shitloads of php files that didn't do anything and in the files that actually did something stuff like if (false) { ... large incomprehensible code block .. } was common. Why comment out stuff when you can just disable it programmatically?
  - davidw 17y ago
    I did some work at a place where they had a PHP class called something like "foobar_2004_08". Given that it was 2006, I asked about axing it, but was told it was still in use. Shudder
  - theli0nheart 17y ago
    Ugh, makes me sick to my stomach.
  - scotty79 17y ago
    The cause could be that inside the block there were already the /* */ comments, and editor did not have single keystroke option to add // at the beginning of each selected line.

ivankirigin 17y ago

I "know" C. But are there any good resources on learning to build real systems in C? I don't like C++.

nkurz 17y ago
I've found some books like Maguire's "Writing Solid Code" and McConnell's "Code Complete" to be helpful, but your best resources are probably the source code to systems similar to your definition of 'real'. Depending on this definition, I'd suggest looking at the source for SQLite (compact and rock solid), Apache (customizable request handling), Perl (for polymorphic data types), and Linux (a big modular system). Basically, pick any of the open source tools you use, and see how they've solved the problem you are interested in!
wooby 17y ago
The best resource I've found was "The Unix Programming Environment," which goes beyond the C language and into using common libraries and organizing C projects with make and other tools. Other than that, some food for thought on use of C in the real world is this article by Rob Pike, "Notes on Programming in C:" http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/pikestyle.html http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/pikestyle.html
sunkencity 17y ago
Look at successful open source projects and read the source.
- silentbicycle 17y ago
  Some successful open source projects have dreadful source, though. There are several threads on HN recommending source to read. (Off the top of my head, I'd recommend the source for Lua and OpenBSD's userland utilities.)
  - thamer 17y ago
    Lua is often recommended, but the one I've seen the most praise for is SQLite.

cturner 17y ago

can’t help but think that Sun continued to blow its opportunities here, for years. Usually I jump on the bash-java bandwagon. However, I think the author's wrong about this. Java is good in a team setting, and Java is the best choice for the enterprise. I support a cross-platform, plugin-oriented Java application with a large install base and wouldn't want it written in anything else. In C applications, it happens that applications will have segfaults, and threaded log less helpfully on the way down whereas in java there's a command that allows you to analyse threads of a running process. When there's a Java problem I have much better odds of getting my head around the source than I would for the sort of macro-affected C source that you'd need for an application run in this setting. If it were to run out of memory it would be clear about it. When you're stuck with libraries where the source and developers are long gone it's realistic to use a decompiler. With some preparation at dev time you can use the classpath and classloaders to hot-patch. C is good for programmers, but not so good for the other technical workers. And I don't think C is as much of a big deal as it used to be due to the advances in scripting languages. I do a fair bit of programming oriented around unix system calls, all in python. Sometimes I find the documentation is better in C, and mock it up there, and then carry it back to python where I can do more with it. Also, if you're on Bigco's standard-issue Solaris host you're far more likely to find perl than a C compiler. Computers are faster than they used to be. Raw execution speed and memory footprint of a process (areas where C is stronger) are much less relevant to scale issues than they used to be. Reply said: The author is comparing Java to C#, not C. Er - ah - so he did. Thanks for being polite about it.

arohner 17y ago
The author is comparing Java to C#, not C.
kabdib 17y ago
If it matters, I happen to agree with you, as what you said holds true for Java-vs-C as well as for C#-vs-C. For Java-vs-C#, I hold my ground :-) I tend to hack up Perl-like tools in C# these days, using a small regexp-centric framework that also handles command line parsing. It's not much more code, and I feel better about it in my current community.