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Why Aren't There C Conferences?

nullprogram.com

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Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think that making connections with people working on same things you do is waste of time you’ve got another thing coming. But yeah nobody writes code at conferences, I thought that was pretty obvious.

> But yeah nobody writes code at conferences Depends on the conference, I suppose, but most I've been to include a healthy dose of that. Certainly writing production code for work is rare, but for fun? Lots of it gets written there.

I've absolutely seen people from well-known companies and consulting groups sitting in a conference talk hacking on their work projects. Very frequently. For the past decade, easily. And as recently as last week, at RubyConf.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of the ones you list, only one has a wide focus, IMO. Three of those will essentially be web development conferences, and I don't know what the hell people do with Go these days, but I'll bet it's mostly a handful of things. Python probably has broad enough usage and scope to counter what I said. The exception proves the rule. :-)

Python is probably mostly data science if I had to guess. jupyter notebooks have made python excessively used for data science.

That's absolutely false. Firstly, while the advent of Jupyter notebooks have certainly made using Python better for data science, why would you think that would cause people using Python for unrelated purposes to stop using it for those purposes?

Practically, while data science / ML / etc work is a big part of Python, I'd wager a much larger part is still web development work (Django et all). And of course, just using it as a "scripting" language, or using it to create GUIs, etc.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#64
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i don't know, there are Golang, Python, Javascript, Ruby, PHP conferences and probably a lot more, so not sure if that argument is valid.

Of the ones you list, only one has a wide focus, IMO. Three of those will essentially be web development conferences, and I don't know what the hell people do with Go these days, but I'll bet it's mostly a handful of things. Python probably has broad enough usage and scope to counter what I said. The exception proves the rule. :-)

I mean, there's CppCon as mentioned in the article, and C++ has pretty much the same wide reach as C.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#65
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But yeah nobody writes code at conferences Depends on the conference, I suppose, but most I've been to include a healthy dose of that. Certainly writing production code for work is rare, but for fun? Lots of it gets written there.

I've absolutely seen people from well-known companies and consulting groups sitting in a conference talk hacking on their work projects. Very frequently. For the past decade, easily. And as recently as last week, at RubyConf.

I was mentally distinguishing between "code that gets written at a conference because it's a conference" and "code that gets written at a conference because the person is bored/on a deadline/unable to persuade their employer that they need to have time to learn".

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python is probably mostly data science if I had to guess. jupyter notebooks have made python excessively used for data science.

Python is probably mostly data science if I had to guess. You think? I'll admit that my view of the Python community is super narrow, but I was thinking Django, me writing a bunch of test scripts, backend stuff. I know data science is a "thing" with Python, but I just didn't imagine that it had become it's main use. I guess TIL there's a whole other world of how people use Python, and it might be most of them. :-)

I run an ML team whose primary language is Python, and I’ve been doing scientific computation in Python (eg finite elements, numerical optimisation) in Python for a long time.

My personal impression is that Python is used in more fields than almost any other language, but that every community is only peripherally aware of other communities.

For example, Python is big in Earth Sciences (or so I am told). Almost nobody outside Earth Sciences knows that.

Until maybe 5 years ago, I had no idea that people used Python for web development. It had just never occurred to me. GvR famously had to google what wsgi was.

So I think your final sentence probably applies to most users of Python.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#67
post #13

Lets be honest: conferences exist to waste time. Nothing productive gets done on conferences and best thing you can take our from them is to socialize with like-minded people.

What about hackathons? Open source sprees? Meeting people from your language/framework/trade IRL and forming relationships?

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#68

Are there many new projects being started these days in C, or even C++? I would expect most of that to have moved over to Java or Golang, with most C-family coding being on extensions of older projects.

Tons. Heck, I'm working on one now. Nothing really matches the performance or wealth of libraries as C/C++. Rust comes close but even then for something like a linear algebra library the ability to use CPU intrinsics, etc. makes a huge difference.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#69

Are there many new projects being started these days in C, or even C++? I would expect most of that to have moved over to Java or Golang, with most C-family coding being on extensions of older projects.

Of course! Many, many algorithmic intensive applications are written in C/CPP. Low-level applications are as well. As just one example, most algorithmic Python libraries are actually implemented in C/CPP.

Not to mention any memory-intensive or real-time software, e.g. embedded systems - most of those are running on C/CPP, and plenty of new embedded systems are created every day.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#70

Are there many new projects being started these days in C, or even C++? I would expect most of that to have moved over to Java or Golang, with most C-family coding being on extensions of older projects.

There are entire product categories (Games / Databases / Operating Systems / Video editors / Animation / Data analysis tools / robotics) where C/C++ continue to be the dominant languages.
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