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Why Aren't There C Conferences?

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Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#301

Post by shaklee3 »

simias wrote: post #220
tpush wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

C++ is a wildly unstable language compared to C. Every new standard brings a slew of new coding paradigms and features, often changing the way to write C++ code pretty fundamentally. On top of that C++ is a hellish beast of a language of such tremendous complexity that you can probably host hundreds of conference where you'd teach even experienced C++ coders things they don't know. They won't run out of material any…

This is completely false. C++11 introduced a lot of new paradigms, and that's it. That shift was for the better, and I haven't met a single person who can honestly say that the changes they made turned it into a worse language. Quite the opposite: it's more expressive, readable, and easier to use.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#302

Post by kazinator »

SiVal wrote: post #222
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…

To find the answer, I would ask, Why are there conferences for other technologies? What are they for? And I think the answer is probably 1) get useful news about recent and upcoming changes and 2) to socialize. I'm going to guess--possibly just projecting--that most C developers are older and not terribly interested in meeting new "C friends" or jumping into some hot, new "C startup". That leaves #1. Web/AI-ML/cloud/…

> I'm going to guess--possibly just projecting--that most C developers are older and not terribly interested in meeting new "C friends" or jumping into some hot, new "C startup".

Unfortunately that doesn't explain why there are not only aren't C conferences today, but there weren't C conferences 15, 20, 30 years ago.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#303

Post by shaklee3 »

johan_larson wrote: post #52

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.

Yes. They're two of the most popular programming languages, and that didn't happen by supporting only old code. I started a new c++ project last week since I still prefer it to go.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#304

Post by kazinator »

There absolutely are C conferences. They just aren't conferences of this type:

"We have speakers who made some cool stuff in a hyped up new language called C and are exited about it, and sharing the techniques!"

They are of this type:

"We have speakers who will share some approaches for preventing and discovering stability and security flaws in widely deployed low-level, middleware and embedded components and stacks."

You have to read between the lines that a lot of this is actually about C.

C doesn't need to be mentioned in the title because it's the 900 pound, white elephant in the room.

C conferences are also of this type:

"We have a gathering of experts in the domain area surrounding a very specialized software stack (that happens to be written in C, and carries a C API).

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#305

Post by Delmania »

spydum wrote: post #288
DonHopkins wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sëë yä thërë düdë! http://www.hammerfest.co.uk/

Wow so if you visited that site with no contextual understanding, you would arrive and leave with literally no additional knowledge of what the heck it was! How fantastic!

Seems obvious it’s a metal festival in the U.K. As for who HRH no clue.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#306

Post by guachesuedehack »

Koshkin wrote: post #112
guachesuedehack wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is barely even a community for it, the c language itself like golang has.

Because, yeah, that would be like an "air breathing community."

I mean we have CPPconn which talks abt frameworks and design patterns mostly

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#307

Post by klodolph »

earenndil wrote: post #281
klodolph wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "p…

interface{} is completely different, in that it doesn't allow polymorphism. In python, I can add = lambda a, b: a+b, and then call add on ints, floats, strs, or some custom type of my own. In go, I can pass an interface{} and check if its type is the same as some other type I know about. But no polymorphism.

This is factually incorrect, interface{} allows polymorphism. Maybe you are unaware of how interface{} works but if you want to call a method on it you just do this:

    func myFunc(a interface{}) {
        a.(interface{ f() }).f()
    }
This works for any type "a" which has a method "f" with the correct signature, and this is what I meant when I said “except it requires casting”. The fact that you can’t do this with + is merely a consequence of the fact that + is just the __add__ method in Python, and in Golang + is not a method. The fact that Golang matches method signatures whereas Python only matches method names is not really a substantial difference in my eyes.

I don’t think there’s a strong case to be made here that interface{} is substantially different from Any in Python, again, except for the required cast. And I think we all agree that neither Python nor Golang support generics. (Python supports metaprogramming, and you can implement something similar to generics with metaprogramming, but I don’t consider that to mean that Python supports generics. Type checkers retrofitted onto Python also support generics, but I don’t really consider those to be core Python yet.)

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#308

Post by svat »

kazinator wrote: post #304

There absolutely are C conferences. They just aren't conferences of this type: "We have speakers who made some cool stuff in a hyped up new language called C and are exited about it, and sharing the techniques!" They are of this type: "We have speakers who will share some approaches for preventing and discovering stability and security flaws in widely deployed low-level, middleware and embedded components and stacks.…

> the 900 pound, white elephant in the room

Interesting phrase, a mixture of at least three phrases:

- "800-pound gorilla" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/800-pound_gorilla) -- something big that can do whatever it wants

- "white elephant" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_elephant) -- an expensive but useless gift or thing

- "elephant in the room" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_in_the_room) -- something obvious that no one wants to discuss.

It's not clear which meaning you're trying to convey. C is definitely not useless, so I imagine that the "white elephant" part at least is not intended. Note that an adult elephant weighs several thousand pounds, so a 900-pound elephant is probably a baby elephant.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#310

Post by jhbadger »

kevinconaway wrote: post #276
dymk wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ruby is used in a lot of places where Rails isn't, by a few large companies. The one that comes to mind is Stripe, which has at least a couple hundred engineers writing Ruby code that has nothing to do with web development (much less Rails). While Rails certainly did a huge amount to make the language popular, there's lots of things Ruby is good at aside from concatenating snippets of HTML. Actually, that being said,…

>Ruby is used in a lot of places where Rails isn't, by a few large companies. And indirectly by many more who use chef

And many people use Homebrew on OSX, or Linuxbrew (homebrew for Linux -- useful especially for users of beowulf clusters who often don't have rights to install anything except in their home directories), and brew and its formulas are written in Ruby.
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