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Why Aren't There C Conferences?

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Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#291

Post by voltagex_ »

smnplk wrote: post #273
sbov wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish people would stop comparing programming languages to Hammers. It's a meaningless meme. Yes, they are tools, but comparing them to Hammers is 100% ridiculous. A language is not a hammer. It is a tool. You know what else are tools? Chainsaws, databases, lasers, and tunnel boring machines that cost tens of millions of dollars. There are plenty of conferences about tools.

You need to go further and accept that programming languages are also not tools.

If they're not tools, then what are they? Where do you draw the line?

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#292

Post by voltagex_ »

fishtoaster wrote: post #82
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 dunno- I just got back from rubyconf where I both gave and watched talks on metaprogramming with no web focus at all. There was a great illustrated talk featuring lemurs that was just a walkthrough of rebuilding various enumerable methods with reduce. Other ones that I went to: - a "how ruby's GC works" talk - A deep dive into how a core dev found + fixed memory usage in ruby - The unexpected pitfalls of sublassing…

Offtopic: The waffle talk is listed at https://rubyconf.org/program#session-697 and it may have been recorded. These are my favourite kinds of talks at conferences.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#293

Post by bitwize »

simias wrote: post #214
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. I'm mostly a C coder but I've been on the Rust train since pretty early and I remember being pretty confused when they started putting emphasis on the Rust branding with logos, the whole "rustacean" thing, conferences, forums etc... In hindsight I get it but originally there was a bit of a culture shock. I mean I don't wear C T-shirts and as far as I can tell there's not really a standard C logo either. Mayb…

In order to avoid becoming a niche language nobody uses due to the network effects of C's ubiquity, and to achieve its goal of completely replacing C as much as is practically feasible, Rust needs buy-in and what economists call pre-committing. That is to say, it needs thought leaders to accept that Rust is the future and commit to building things in Rust, even when it doesn't make sense to do so in the current climate. Hence the heavy emphasis on marketing and RESF psyops.

> "c-lions"

C-lioning - n. Derailing a discussion by "politely" demanding evidence that obviously unsafe programming practices are unsafe and should never be used. E.g., "Can you tell me, exactly, why aliased pointers are bad?"

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#294

Post by voltagex_ »

skykooler wrote: post #116
beat wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Go is written in Go, which is why you need it installed in the first place before you can run the go compiler.

Bootstrapping problems are interesting/frustrating, especially if you're trying to get a new package into Debian.

If you wanted to build Go from source, what would you build first? What version(s)?

Edit: the documentation is outstanding - https://golang.org/doc/install/source#go14

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#295

Post by voltagex_ »

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.

I wouldn't be as good a programmer or as happy with my life without conferences. Maybe you're attending the wrong ones?

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#296

Post by flukus »

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…

> Letting old C devs pass on their wisdom to new C devs. C has a lot of pitfalls but also has a lot of neat tricks.

On this topic, does anyone know any good blogs along these lines? I'd love to read some practical day to day stuff from people that have been working in C for decades, usually all I see from places like HN are weird compiler incompatibilities and rare exceptions that I never have to deal with.

Most of my experience comes from toy projects and horrible decades old code I deal with at work. The former is great for trying out ideas but I don't learn how they scale (human wise) on larger longer projects and the later is more a lesson in what not to do.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#297

Post by criddell »

maxxxxx wrote: post #100
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…

Exactly. C programmers don't define themselves as C programmers mainly. They are firmware developers, game developers or something else. That's where their real interest is.

I've been to C++ conferences. If Scott Meyers, Herb Sutter, or Andrei Alexandrescu were on the ticket, I know it would easily be worth it.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#298

Post by oneplane »

Narishma wrote: post #285
oneplane wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main problem with that is there is no single C community. Imagine trying to get ANSI C, Win32 C, GNU C and every flavor of embedded C together.

Why does C++ not have that problem? It too has many communities but they manage to go to the same conferences without any issues.

Mostly due to the less diverse nature of the communities I guess. Because C is older and used a lot more low-level you get a lot more strange C versions and C users.

Most of the C developers/users are going to be interested in their topic, which is often already having a conference of their own. Think Linux Kernel Plumbers conference which is just about the kernel, and since practically all of it is written in C that's where you'd find all the people you'd want to meet on your C-topic.

There would be no point in going to a conference that is about using win32 and C when you are not using win32 as virtually nothing (besides the basics, but those basics aren't why you'd attend a conference) ports to your own environment.

Because C++ has a lot of extras that can be used in a variety of cases that cross platforms and APIs all the same, and because it has a different development and dispersion ecosystem, you'd get more of a C++ oriented conference without the information being non-portable.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#299

Post by marcosdumay »

qznc wrote: post #224
marcosdumay wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My computer has "true" version 8.26, and I miss some place I can go to discover what's new from version 8.25.

The history of GNU true: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=histor... For clarification, you are using coreutils 8.26 which includes true among other things.

Yes, it was in jest. The result of "true --version" is actually quite extent, bringing licensing and authorship information and a short explanation of the GPL.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#300

Post by userbinator »

I agree with his reasons for the lack of C conferences, and present one more: what I've noticed from the C developers and "community" (if there is even something to be called that) is a relative lack of dogmatic cargo-cult thinking and otherwise trend-chasing compared to other language communities, which I hypothesise is partly responsible for the "we must have a conference" attitude. To repurpose a phrase, "the choir doesn't need to be preached to."

Also, I allude to above, there's not much of a "C community" either. It's all just a bunch of people using the language for very different purposes and with very different styles, and IMHO this diversity is a good thing; it just doesn't make for a population who would like conferences.

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