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Why Aren't There C Conferences?

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Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#101

Post by pantalaimon »

haberman wrote: post #72

C is effectively frozen in time, thanks largely to Microsoft's decision to deprioritize C support in favor of C++. C99 is almost 20 years old and MSVC still doesn't fully support it. Forget about C11. If you're a C programmer who cares about portability, you stick with C89. There's not a lot of point to having a conference about something that is stuck on a 30 year old standard.

Why would you want to write windows applications in C to begin with?

Heck, if you have a C app and want to port it to windows, you are probably better of just using WSL.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#102

Post by dragonwriter »

beat wrote: post #91
lostgame wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What on earth are you talking about? Assembly. Java. Ruby. Python. The list goes on. Could you explain your rationale behind this statement?

Point me to a compiler or interpreter, any of them, that isn't either written in C or written in something that was written in C. And of course, whatever you play with, it's running on an operating system written in C. If programming is turtles all the way down, C is the bottom turtle, standing on the solid ground of Von Neumann architecture. The point is, C is utterly pervasive. Everything that we think is different…

> Point me to a compiler or interpreter, any of them, that isn't either written in C or written in something that was written in C.

Plenty of languages have self-hosting compilers or interpreters available, which are neither written in C nor written in something written in C.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(compilers)#Li...

I'm also pretty sure that some are written in C++, whose implementations are usually also written in C++, and which (while closely related to C) is not C.

> And of course, whatever you play with, it's running on an operating system written in C.

That's obviously not the case if what you are playing with is an OS written in not-C. It's actually not entirely true in plenty of cases, because operating systems that use C range from almost-entirely C (with some assembly) to C-among-other-things (e.g., z/OS and it's mix of PL/X, HLASM, and C/C++.)

> If programming is turtles all the way down, C is the bottom turtle

I’m pretty sure the bottom turtle is native machine code and/or processor microcode.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#103

Post by dragonwriter »

beat wrote: post #96
kardos wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the point is that the other languages are based on C. From your list CPython, CRuby and the GNU assembler are written in C. Not sure about Java. Edit: not necessarily agreeing, there must be some languages that do not rely on C.

Java runs on the JVM, which is probably written in C++ (which is C, when you start digging). The widely-used Eclipse J9 JVM is written in C++.

> C++ (which is C, when you start digging).

C++ is not C (it was once implemented as a preprocessor in front of a C compiler, but that's not th same as being C, and it's now more likely to implemented as a self-hosting compiler.)

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#104

Post by g4nt1 »

mikestew wrote: post #19

Because though there might be building trades conferences, there are no hammer conferences. Oh, there will be tool vendors at the building trades conferences, there might be sessions on "Efficient Hammering Techniques Using Machine Learning", but there are no conferences about hammers. Don't forget about the blacksmith conference next week, they'll have hammer vendors, too. I dunno, a Ruby conference kinda makes sens…

I very much like your answer. And I now realize why disliked PyCon that much. There are so much things that can be done in python that I don't necessarily care about. Language is not the most important thing, what I do with it is.

I much more prefer going to a conference about let's say, web dev or machine learning. Once at the conference, I might prefer going to a talk that use python because I know this language better.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#105

Post by johnaoss »

mikestew wrote: post #36
kayoone wrote: 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. :-)

People are doing basically everything in Go right now! Front-end web development being the exception (though there is GopherJS...). Projects like Docker, Kubernetes, CockroachDB, Consul (and anything Hashicorp does), Mattermost, and etcd are all being written in Go!

Anecdotally, I've heard people using Go to rewrite some of their Ruby services in which more performance is needed.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#106

Post by beat »

TheDong wrote: post #15
beat wrote: post #2

All programming conferences are C conferences, if you think about it.

I don't see how that follows at all. If you're implying all program languages are derived from C, that's simply false. Lisp is based on the lambda calculus and predates C, as one easy counter-example. If you're implying that all languages run on top of C, that's also false. Theoretical Lisp Machines [0] have been envisioned which do not run C anywhere, and many languages (rust, go, etc) can be built into unikernals t…

Okay, I'll amend my position from "Everything is based on C", to "Everything is based on C except for a handful of LISP machines that nobody cares about but a handful of fundamentalists".

At which point someone who collects antique UNIVACs will tell me I'm wrong, too.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#107

Post by Koshkin »

varjag wrote: post #88
AlphaSite wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest C is kinda boring. Which is fine, but makes it hard to do a C conference.

Fair point, but Go or PHP hardly sound more exciting.

I guess, some languages have to fight for their place under the sun, some don't.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#108

Post by weberc2 »

mikestew wrote: post #36
kayoone wrote: 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 don't know what the hell people do with Go these days, but I'll bet it's mostly a handful of things

The 2018 Go user survey analysis should be released soon, but I'm guessing you're right that it's only used for a few things; however, those few things are pretty significant in terms of marketshare (distributed systems, backend applications, and general purpose tooling--this hypothesis could probably be checked against the StackOverflow survey). Not much on the front-end or mobile application side nor on the embedded side, but probably making some headway on the AI/ML/data-science side.

In general, I think of Go as Python but with 15 years of hindsight but also 15 years of market catchup. Go does a lot of things better than Python (performance, concurrency, distribution, deployment, etc), but the reverse isn't true. The principle advantage to Python is that it was the lingua franca for the data science niche before the niche became a mainstream competency--this means more people were exposed to Python rapidly, but it also means that people are beginning to build high-quality data science libraries in other languages, including Go, which closes the gap between Python and other languages.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#109

Post by Kaveren »

nineteen999 wrote: post #85
Jyaif wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there are new languages being developed, their compiler/interpreter are likely being developed in C/C++, possibly Rust. Also, any new database, OS, or AAA game is going to be written in one of those language.

Not aware of any AAA game titles being developed in Rust, but I'd gladly have my eyes opened.

There are none. Standard Rust is great for game development, the infrastructure just isn't there right now, but I think if you were to write a new game engine or operating system from scratch, Rust would be the first candidate language to do so in.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#110

Post by cies »

varjag wrote: post #88
AlphaSite wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest C is kinda boring. Which is fine, but makes it hard to do a C conference.

Fair point, but Go or PHP hardly sound more exciting.

That for different reasons. Go is not a general purpose language (it's creators specifically focus it's uses on networked apps). PHP is on the decline, nothing kills excitement like decline.
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