241–250 of 396 posts
Pardon my noobness, but if I learned and became proficient in C and knew nothing else, would I have a marketable skill? Is it possible for C to be a standalone skill, where ones job could be 100% programming in C, or do you need a lot of auxiliary knowledge outside of that?
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>enjoying the danger This is a hilariously bad attitude for any software that other people will use. When software crashes, people lose work and time. When software has vulnerabilities, bad guys take advantage of them and build stronger botnets. "The danger" isn't like wiping out when you're pulling a stunt; "the danger" is wasting the good guys' time and empowering bad guys. >There is a lot of great code written in…
This is a hilariously bad attitude for any software that other people will use. When software crashes, people lose work and time. When software has vulnerabilities, bad guys take advantage of them and build stronger botnets. "The danger" isn't like wiping out when you're pulling a stunt; "the danger" is wasting the good guys' time and empowering bad guys. Computers aren't just tools, they're also toys. People use com…
I'm really surprised by the "hate" for C that is appearing in these comments. What ever happened to actually enjoying the danger of getting low level? Is assembly also useless because it isn't readable? There is a lot of great code written in C, and a lot of crappy code written in C. Because C doesn't protect you from yourself, it exacerbates any design flaws your code may have, and makes logical errors ever more ins…
Hear, hear! Unfortunately, C does get a lot of hate on HN. I suspect it has to do with this site's demographics. Many (not all) of the HN clan seem to be oriented towards / mostly familiar with web based technologies. I suspect that for many who have tried, going from a web dev environment to a C oriented dev environment feels like a robust shock to the system. I'd also be willing to bet that there's an age bias at p…
As someone who went the "other direction" (Java -> Ruby -> Javascript) I can say that a lot of it has to do with the accessibility of the ecosystem rather than the language itself. This could absolutely just be my filter bubble, but I've noticed that the communities surrounding Ruby, Python, and Javascript seem to go above and beyond the call of duty when it comes to making libraries easy to use, documenting those libraries, building and refining the tools, and so on.
I know there are good tools out there for C development. I know there are good learning materials. I know there are communities out there dedicated to writing good C code (Shout-out to /r/c_programming on Reddit. Love those folks.) But I can't sort out the signal from the noise, because there isn't a lot of discussion about C programming happening in the online spaces I'm familiar with. As a counterexample, there was a _fantastic_ article on here the other day about "writing your own syscall" in Linux. Yes, it contains a lot of hand-holding and overexplanation, but that's useful for me because I haven't built up the mental model to parse a more terse explanation.
In fact, I think this is how having "the new hotness" change every couple years has been helpful _in some respects_- there's an incentive for lots of people to write blog posts, tutorials, and articles about how to properly use the latest and greatest tech, there's active development going on as people forward-port functionality (and therefore plenty of opportunity for devs to make meaningful contributions and have meaningful discussion about "how to write code using this language/library/framework"). For a short period, both the "old hands" and the newbies are in the same boat, and this is unbelievably useful for training up the next generation of developers.
> Me personally - I love it all. C, C++, Java, Python, Javascript, Rust, Haskell, Scheme, etc. Making computers do things for you, and for other people, by writing detailed instructions is quite possibly one of the funnest things in the world. Double bonus for getting paid to do it!
Same here, friend. :) For what it's worth, I wish there were more of this attitude floating around the Internet.
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Pragmatism over "Oooh Shiny", one of the reasons I have huge respect for the sqlite project ;). Rust looks pretty decent but I'm still in the wait and see stage as well.
I was trying to teach myself some Rust and found the state of the documentation to be very frustrating. The core language is decently documented with the manual, but the standard library documentation was out of date in many places, most annoyingly in the first few hits on Google. I found 5 different ways to read a file on Google, and only one of them still worked. Plus I saw the release notes on the newest version t…
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I've found goto to be a good way of dealing with exceptions in low-level C. For example: void* foo() { int handle = get_some_handle(); if (handle I've seen this pattern frequently in the Linux source code. I think this is an example of a case where usage of goto improves readability and reduces errors.
I've also seen extensive use of gotos for exception handling in C. After the knee-jerk reaction ("...but but Dijkstra!") I came to appreciate it as a useful idiom.
We do things that are harmful all the time, in limited appropriate situations. Cutting into your abdomen is harmful, but a skillfully used surgeon's scalpel can fix a bigger problem. That's not license to go roll around on a pile of jagged, rusty steel scrap. Missing sleep is harmful, but if you do it once in a while to keep your job or to escape a nighttime flash flood then it's helpful.
Dijkstra was intending to set the norm from which people should mindfully and occasionally deviate. The point wasn't to ban the use of labelled jumps entirely.
Goto is considered useful by the book: The use of goto and similar jumps in programming languages has been subject to intensive debate, starting from an article by Dijkstra [1968]. Still today you will find people that seriously object code as it is given here, but let us try to be pragmatic about that: code with or without goto can be ugly and hard to follow.
Have you ever used goto in C? I feel like most people bash on C just because they heard Dijkstra said it, and that's it. Most code I saw while teaching it were not good cases, but sometimes it's a very interesting technique that can make the code easier to understand and shorter. I think that use is beautiful. But it doesn't mean there aren't bad use cases.
Regardless, yes, a ton of people do bash on it because of Dijkstra - but at the time, he had a good point. In the industry of the time (as I understand it - I was a kid when he wrote that), there was a lot of "cowboy coding" out there, with goto's "gone wild" - jumping into the middle of everywhere and everything - and producing "spaghetti code".
But as you note, it can be very useful and make things easier to read (for instance, jumping out of deeply nested if-then constructs - though I could also argue a refactor might be the better solution).
I was once part of a discussion in a forum about state machines, and one guy posted a very beautifully done state machine that used no select-case construct, but rather goto statements, but done in a tight way that mimic'ed a select-case construct. I was very impressed at the time; it was some code for PIC Basic IIRC.
In time, I've changed my views from seeing goto as "always bad", to "can be very useful, in some situations - provided you know the risks of the tool".
In other words - think very carefully before you rush into using it; maybe there's a better or cleaner way.
I wish I could like this book, but after reviewing the first chapter I can only imagine the confusion of students. I support very much the idea of breaking the book into levels, but it attempts to cover far too much, far too quickly and I don't believe this book would be useful for those who are not already familiar with the language. I've been writing C since the late 1980s, moved to mostly C++ by the mid 90s, C# in…
Do you have any recommendations for books?
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We know when undefined behavior will occur(the specs are written very clearly), but not what will happen when it occurs. Our job as competent C programmers is to avoid undefined behavior. C isn't hard(perhaps tedious to do correctly) - it does exactly what you tell it to.
You'd be hard pressed to find a non-trivial C program that doesn't contain any undefined behavior.
I wish I could like this book, but after reviewing the first chapter I can only imagine the confusion of students. I support very much the idea of breaking the book into levels, but it attempts to cover far too much, far too quickly and I don't believe this book would be useful for those who are not already familiar with the language. I've been writing C since the late 1980s, moved to mostly C++ by the mid 90s, C# in…
This has always been my problem with websites like codeacademy, and I started my entire career by learning through that website. Take the Javascript course - a fantastic way to get introduced to the syntax of the language, and I highly recommend it for total noobies. But then you come out of it with no understanding whatsoever about what javascript is . If I asked someone who just finished the course to make an "app"…
The problem with this question is that there is a ton of stuff you need to understand before you can really answer that question fully. To know what public means, you need to understand classes, and visibility rules for classes. To understand static fully, you kind of need to know how c++ works, since it's equivalent to a bare function in a namespace. Void is the type of the return, which means it doesn't have so that's pretty straight-forward. Main is the name of the function that gets run when you run the program, which kind of requires knowledge of program entry points (assembly) either that or the understanding of what a library is. The simplest thing you can say is that it's boilerplate to signify what function gets run when the program starts, but that doesn't really explain any of the pieces.
I'm really surprised by the "hate" for C that is appearing in these comments. What ever happened to actually enjoying the danger of getting low level? Is assembly also useless because it isn't readable? There is a lot of great code written in C, and a lot of crappy code written in C. Because C doesn't protect you from yourself, it exacerbates any design flaws your code may have, and makes logical errors ever more ins…