Some Were Meant for C: The Endurance of an Unmanageable Language [pdf]
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Re: Some Were Meant for C: The Endurance of an Unmanageable Language [pdf]
#2Started reading the article, once I reached the second page I lost interest and scrolled to the conclusion.
Based on the parts I read, the writing style is needlessly verbose, and the author is not saying anything which hasn't already been said.
Re: Some Were Meant for C: The Endurance of an Unmanageable Language [pdf]
#3[deleted]
Re: Some Were Meant for C: The Endurance of an Unmanageable Language [pdf]
#4Started reading the article, once I reached the second page I lost interest and scrolled to the conclusion. Based on the parts I read, the writing style is needlessly verbose, and the author is not saying anything which hasn't already been said.
I agree with the verbosity. But many of those in the demographic that would do away with C belong more to the current pop-culture of "coding!!1" instead of the carefully-considered, patiently-implemented ancient art of engineering.
The pop-culture "coding" collective as a whole is not generally known for its appreciation of terse explanations. I will admit that it does favor immediate gratification, though; there is that.
Ideally, this would do the rounds with different people excerpting different bits of it. That would spark many little conversations over time, and contribute to keeping the discussion going. That would be nice.
Re: Some Were Meant for C: The Endurance of an Unmanageable Language [pdf]
#5This is a long paper and the author has 2 main claims:
1) C Language popularity is more to do with cognitive ease of memory addresses as a conceptual model for inspection and change. Author claims memory address mental model overshadows runtime performance.
2) switching to "safe" languages like Java/C#/Rust is not necessary. With no changes/violations to existing C Language specification, a new/different implementation (compiler) can add more runtime safety checks similar to managed languages. An example from the paper:
>Consider unchecked array accesses. Nowhere does C define that array accesses are unchecked. It just happens that implementations don’t check them. This is an implementation norm, not a fact of the language.
Those 2 ideas look orthogonal but he ties them together at the end.
I'll take some poetic license (e.g. a little exaggeration) to reword the author's idea to help spur discussion...
Consider the idea of the Sufficiently Smart Compiler[1] that claims that a "slow" and "high-level" language like Python/Ruby could be theoretically analyzed and compiled to be as fast as C or handcrafted assembly.
In a way, the author is coming from the opposite direction. If you had a "Sufficiently Smart Runtime" for a new C Language compiler implementation, it could (theoretically) do all sorts of extra checks and bookkeeping that wouldn't require any changes to C source code and wouldn't violate the existing C Language standard. (E.g. Imagine a new C runtime that did many checks similar to Valgrind + UBSAN + ASAN + debugger memory fences, etc.)
Would the program execution be slower? Well yes, but that's not really an issue because according to author's claim #1, what programmers really like about C is the mental ease of accessing memory addresses. The performance is important, but it's a secondary benefit -- according to the author.
Re: Some Were Meant for C: The Endurance of an Unmanageable Language [pdf]
#6Started reading the article, once I reached the second page I lost interest and scrolled to the conclusion. Based on the parts I read, the writing style is needlessly verbose, and the author is not saying anything which hasn't already been said.
I agree with the verbosity. But many of those in the demographic that would do away with C belong more to the current pop-culture of "coding!!1" instead of the carefully-considered, patiently-implemented ancient art of engineering. The pop-culture "coding" collective as a whole is not generally known for its appreciation of terse explanations. I will admit that it does favor immediate gratification, though; there is…
[deleted]
Re: Some Were Meant for C: The Endurance of an Unmanageable Language [pdf]
#7This is another article overanalyzing the success of C, when in fact the reason for the success of C is very simple and obvious: Unix was free and in a lucky position in 1973; Unix got popular; C is the language of Unix; therefore C got popular. There is no inherent benefit in C that, for example, a somewhat modified version of Pascal or Algol wouldn't have inherited. And these kinds of articles always ignore the fact that in the past decade or so, C and C++ have been declining in popularity. By and large, new programmers are not learning C the way they were in the '90s. For better or worse (personally, I think, for the better), they're starting with JavaScript, Python, Ruby, or even PHP.
I'm highly skeptical of the conclusion that what we need is a new safer implementation of C, too. Switching to a new compiler is a very high burden for a lot of projects, and at the end of the day they're still left with all the problems of C, like header files, no namespaces, terrible standard library, etc. etc. (Even adding compiler switches is a high burden, which is why Linux distros took so long to widely deploy basic things like -fstack-protector.) By contrast, switching to a new language (or incrementally writing new components in a new language, which is how this always goes in practice) is also a very high burden, but the benefits are larger: you don't have to deal with all the problems of C.
In my view, this is why safer versions of C have repeatedly failed over the years, while new languages have flourished. Migration to a new language or a new compiler is expensive no matter what, so teams will only do it if they see enough benefit to justify the expense of doing so. Merely adding some amount of safety to C isn't worth it, but the large safety and productivity gains you can get from a different language can be.
Re: Some Were Meant for C: The Endurance of an Unmanageable Language [pdf]
#8Started reading the article, once I reached the second page I lost interest and scrolled to the conclusion. Based on the parts I read, the writing style is needlessly verbose, and the author is not saying anything which hasn't already been said.
I agree with the verbosity. But many of those in the demographic that would do away with C belong more to the current pop-culture of "coding!!1" instead of the carefully-considered, patiently-implemented ancient art of engineering. The pop-culture "coding" collective as a whole is not generally known for its appreciation of terse explanations. I will admit that it does favor immediate gratification, though; there is…
Personally, I appreciated how the author spent a decent amount of time "unpacking" what he meant- for instance, the "To manage or to mediate" section. Terseness is only useful when you already have a shared protocol for understanding the message and a guarantee that it won't be garbled along the way.
On the other hand, if you're trying to communicate to folks without that shared protocol (in this case, to people who aren't familiar with/haven't spent much time using C as a primary language) it's kinda necessary to go a little further to get the point across.
> Ideally, this would do the rounds with different people excerpting different bits of it. That would spark many little conversations over time, and contribute to keeping the discussion going. That would be nice.
Absolutely agree.
Re: Some Were Meant for C: The Endurance of an Unmanageable Language [pdf]
#9This is another article overanalyzing the success of C, when in fact the reason for the success of C is very simple and obvious: Unix was free and in a lucky position in 1973; Unix got popular; C is the language of Unix; therefore C got popular. There is no inherent benefit in C that, for example, a somewhat modified version of Pascal or Algol wouldn't have inherited. And these kinds of articles always ignore the fac…
You are ignoring the fact that many problems can't be solved in the higher level languages.
Also, for some, having the c/c++ level of control is prefered.
Re: Some Were Meant for C: The Endurance of an Unmanageable Language [pdf]
#10Here's a good quote: "Unless we can understand the real reasons programmers continue to use C, we risk researchers continuing to solve a set of problems that is incomplete and/or irrelevant, while practitioners continue to use flawed tools."
In other words, stop blithely claiming that everyone is stupid for using C/C++. Instead, find out why they use it. Then, if you continue to think that C/C++ needs to be replaced, find a better way for those people to do what they are doing that they currently find C/C++ to be the best way to do.