3 ms·

I like C, maybe it is Good Enough, but don't you think C has some real flaws that could be fixed in a newer language?

• tptacek 17y ago
  I think there's ~30 years of C code that isn't going away and that is going to remain the bottom layer of most programming stacks, and it's good for devs to be able to drop into it.
  • mdemare 17y ago
    There will always be a need for a bottom layer language, but 20 years from now, will it still be C? I hope at some point the world will migrate to a newer language.
    • blasdel 17y ago
      Anything you could write a native filesystem or device driver in would be semantically quite similar to C, even in the ideal microkernel fantasy.
    • jacquesm 17y ago
      Why would you hope that if the old language is doing just fine for the purpose ?
      • anigbrowl 17y ago
        'Just fine' is relative. The state of California still does all its financial transactions on a mainframe running COBOL; the cost of maintenance rises every year, but thanks to our budget deficit nobody wants to write the check for the cost of replacement.
  • joeld42 17y ago
    That's a great point, and I won't even look at a new language anymore unless it has C linkage. Which Go does (as does D, OCaml, and many more...).