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Why Aren't There C Conferences?

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Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#141

Post by outside1234 »

Svoka wrote: 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.

Here is how I approach conferences:

1. Decide up front what sessions I am going to attend. All of these things should be stuff that I know very little about or take my knowledge from 200 to 300. Don't go to sessions that you know the answer to. Be super selective on sessions as well: skip vendor shills and affirmative action placements.

2. Look AND SCHEDULE casual between-session coffee meetings with folks I know are attending. This both deepens my relationships with them and you also tend to meet people most effectively this way that happen to be with that person.

3. Go to birds of a feather (if possible). People are much more likely to want to meet other people at these things.

4. Ask everyone you can "How their conference is going?" and "What are you working on in this space?". I make it a goal to ask at least ten people this a day between the coffee station lines, lunch, happy hour. At a great conference people love talking about what they are passionate about.

5. Drop out of late night events and drinking sessions if you are just there for the music or the beer and not getting knowledge or connections out of it. This is business, not party time.

If you can't do these things, yes, it is a waste of time.

But if you can, I find that I can leverage all of the info and contacts out of this relentlessly at my $DAY_JOB to get a lot done the rest of the year.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#142

Post by marcosdumay »

mikestew wrote: post #50
lettergram wrote: post #40

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. :-)

At this point, Python is probably the second most used language for system programming (after C), one of the top 4 in web development (no idea on their ordering), around the top for other network protocols (I'd guess 3rd), the top language for data science, on the top 5 of scientific computing, on the top 5 for embedded computing (what sounds completely crazy, but there are few languages there), on the top 4 for game creation (probably 4th), the top one for electronics CAD and among the top for other kinds of CAD, the top one for GIS...

I can't think of other niches right now, but whatever one you think, it's probably on the top 5 there.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#143

Post by gnulinux »

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.

I think this is a very debatable claim. MSVC is an insignificant compiler in a lot of industries. In something like scientific computing, everything is written with gcc, clang and Intel on mind. Sure, you'll find some companies still using MSVC, but it's not industry standard any more and it's very unclear how an insignificant, outdated compiler can stop the progress of world's most fundamental programming language.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#144

Post by gnulinux »

stcredzero wrote: post #7

Because ioccc is either too cheap to rent a ballroom, or they're not too cheap but in following their theme and long practice, they aren't telling you when and where they rented one. EDIT: It's true. HN has no sense of humor.

HN is not a place to make cheap jokes.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#146

Post by davrosthedalek »

edanm wrote: post #63
lettergram wrote: post #40

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.

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 usin…

To be fair, it is my impression that even in data science, python is more a less a scripting language, and all the libraries which do the heavy lifting computing-wise are written in something else, because speed. Has this changed?

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#147

Post by ggreer »

Apparently there's not enough interest among those who write C. Back in 2012, Brandon Philips (CoreOS CTO & kernel contributor) tried valiantly to organize a C conference, but there weren't enough speakers and presentations.[1]

1. https://web.archive.org/web/20160304013703/http://www.cconf....

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#148

Post by chewxy »

weberc2 wrote: post #108
mikestew wrote: post #36

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. :-)

> 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 ag…

A bunch of us are trying to change that and make Go the lingua franca for data science and machine learning! The libraries du jour are Gonum (https://gonum.org), a numpy/scipy equiv for Go, and Gorgonia (https://gorgonia.org), a PyTorch/Tensorflow equiv. Do help out!

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#149

Post by klodolph »

holografix wrote: post #124
weberc2 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ag…

I’m a beginner in Go and not an expert in Python. However Python is a lot easier to develop with than Go: generics, no pointers, standard collections have many convenience functions, package handling, etc.

Saying that Python has "no pointers" is a bit of an oversimplification, somewhere between "technically true, but misleading" and "actually incorrect", depending on how you define your terms and frame the question. Remember that Java has "no pointers" too, it works basically the same way Python does (except for some minor quibbles about primitive types), except if you go to 4.3.1 of the Java SE 11 spec and look for "pointer" you'll find the flat admission that Java has pointers.

The part about pointers that makes programming hard is that you can create multiple references to the same object, and if you don't realize this, you can modify something that you didn't realize you were modifying. In Python this can happen easily enough:

    a = []
    b = a
    a.append(1)
Question: what is the value of b? You might think that this is pretty obvious, but once you can answer this question correctly, you basically understand pointers. In fact, it's not really relevant whether you say that "a" and "b" are pointers or whether you say that they are object references, conceptually, it does not matter what you call them. The fact that Golang has different syntax for pointers and the fact that you can get the address of local variables or member fields is no big deal, since understanding how pointers work is the hard part, and Python already makes you do that.

Package handling in practice I would say is a wash, more or less. Both Python and Golang have multiple different ways of managing packages, depending on your preferences.

It's flat incorrect to say that Python has generics. What Python has is dynamic typing. Golang has interface{}, which is equivalent to what Python has, except it requires casting.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#150

Post by 1morethrowaway2 »

spydum wrote: post #126
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 agree with your point but HammerFest 2019 sounds like a freaking blast. I think there is an underserved market there.

There's http://www.hamerfest.nl/

It was a blast! And C actually came up in one conversation...

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