Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Aren't There C Conferences?

nullprogram.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 383 posts

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#171

Post by pathseeker »

davrosthedalek wrote: post #146
edanm wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The underlying libraries may be in C, but the vast majority of data scientists never need to alter the C so it's fair to say most data science code is written in python. Python/Numpy/pandas has enabled data scientists to avoid writing C entirely.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#172

Post by kurtisc »

gnulinux wrote: post #144
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.

Tell that to the bash people above.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#173

Post by saagarjha »

mrpippy wrote: post #5

Related tweet from last week: https://twitter.com/krzyzanowskim/status/1062740353533513728 Observation: Before 2014, iOS conferences were iOS conferences and was mostly about how to use the frameworks. After 2014, iOS conferences renamed to Swift conferences and everyone tries to figure out how to use Swift - like this is the main pain point or what?

Swift is a complex language, and this allows for a lot more people to talk about how their programming paradigm is the best way to write Swift. It’s the same reason we often see articles like “extending Optionals” or “AutoLayout with a DSL” on Hacker News: Swift is so overwhelmingly used for iOS development that people seem to find it useful to specialize it in places where it designed to be general, and they love to tell other people about it.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#174

Post by saagarjha »

Apocryphon wrote: post #30
deminature wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, they're still about frameworks mostly, they just brand themselves as Swift conferences to indicate there isn't going to be any Objective-C oriented content presented, so people don't attend with the wrong expectation. Swift-oriented content at a conference is also going to be popular, as unlike frameworks, it affects every developer, as compared to frameworks where only a percentage may use each one…

I wonder if there might still be new Objective-C content that could be presented for iOS development, or if everything is just Swift now.

Objective-C, as a language, is still improving slowly. But it’s pretty mature overall; the majority of Objective-C developers I know actually write Objective-C++ and hence tend to follow the development of new C++ features.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#175

Post by sephware »

wikwocket wrote: post #163
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 get your analogy, but I think there are tons of hammer conferences. There are conferences for most any language with wide adoption. There's also a Slack conference (not "TeamChatConf," but a "Slack Frontiers"). There's a GitHub conf (not "OpenSourceDevCon," but "GitHub Universe"). There is a Datadog conference, and so on and so on. Maybe C just doesn't have one big company, or an ecosystem of smaller ones, that sta…

I think the core distinction is business-centric conferences vs developer-centric conferences. You've entirely named the former. Those are geared towards using platforms, and while developers are welcome, they aren't the entirety of the target audience, business professionals (eg MBAs) are just as first-class at those. But Ruby and Python and Swift conferences are going to entirely be geared towards developers.

I think the hammer analogy works better as conferences for building houses (business conferences) vs power tools (developer conferences) vs hand tools (no conferences), the distinction being how quickly can you get to a finished house. A power tool is something that can make houses quickly. A hand tool can be used quickly and efficiently by someone very experienced with them, but power tools can be used by almost anyone.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#176

Post by haberman »

gnulinux wrote: post #143
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.

C's strength is being the lingua franca of the bottom of the stack. I can believe that there are some applications that know a priori that they will never need to be portable to MSVC. But for any foundational open-source library, closing the door to MSVC is a high price to pay. Someone, sooner or later, will want to use the code on Windows. If you are zlib, ffmpeg, freetype, Lua, LuaJIT, sqlite, libpng, c-ares, OpenSSL, PostgreSQL, glib, gtk, or anything that aspires to be as widely used as these, you stay C89-compatible to support MSVC.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#177

Post by varjag »

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.

Noone cares about Microsoft except a dozen guys caught in the reservation^Wecosystem there who still haven't moved to .NET.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#178

Post by kuang_eleven »

lettergram wrote: post #40
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. :-)

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

For as much as this is getting downvoted, I've been to PyCon several years running, and it is correct. While the actual usage of Python is very broad, the PyCon convention itself skews very heavily towards data science applications.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#179

Post by varjag »

visualstudio wrote: post #49

I could see it happening in the future. There's has been a mini resurgence in C from (normally high level language) programmers who are getting sick of web development and are interested in data oriented design. Conference benefits could be: Pushing the C standard. C11 is barely supported. Discussing new standards in a forum other than mailing lists. Did you guys know there is already a C17 standard? Letting old C de…

> C11 is barely supported.

Username checks out.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#180

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

lispm wrote: post #170
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ones based on Java run on the JVM, which is always written in C :) The ones written in Lisp, well, at the bottom it's C again. I haven't seen a popular lisp yet with a meaningful amount of assembly in lieu of C.

> The ones written in Lisp I have some of these exotic Lisp Machines from the 80s which run no C code by default and where the C compiler is optional and written in Lisp. ;-) Obviously exotic and outdated. An alternate world. > I haven't seen a popular lisp yet with a meaningful amount of assembly in lieu of C. https://github.com/Clozure/ccl/tree/master/level-0/ARM And, yes, the assembler is written in Lisp, too.

You missed "popular". Very cool, though.
Post reply on HN