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

371–380 of 383 posts

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#371

Post by fishtoaster »

klenwell wrote: post #134
fishtoaster wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A couple members of my team attended and we made a friendly wager before they attended: how many conference attendees would be primarily Rails developers? We guessed respectively 25%, 50%, 75% (my guess). Based on some very, very, very fuzzy sampling, they estimated it was somewhere around 50%. Any guess yourself? Are you a Rails dev?

I'm surprised it's so low, actually. I'd have guessed 75% as well. And yes, I am a web developer, spending about half my time in rails and the other half split between JS and misc ops stuff.

Thankfully rubyconf explicitly says that it's not the place for rails-focused talks, which results in a lot of great discussion on other aspects + usages of the language. :)

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#372

Post by SiVal »

kazinator wrote: post #302
SiVal wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was a C programmer 30 years ago, but we didn't attend C conferences for two reasons: 1) programming languages weren't newsworthy enough to generate much buzz. Hardware was the focus of attention, and things like programming languages tended to be features of products, not products themselves. And 2) C was already about 20 years old by that point in any case, so monthly magazines were sufficient to keep up with the changes. We didn't tend to go to Fortran or COBOL conferences, either.

We DID go to conferences or expos for things that were buzzy and newsworthy, which meant the exciting new world of microcomputers: Comdex, MacWorld, etc. But the emphasis was on exposition, not conferencing with others, because we got to see exciting, new things with our own eyes, when that was the only way to see them (couldn't "see" things online). We wanted to see them (and they wanted to show them) to inform our decisions. The makers of C tools filled plenty of booths at the "computer expos", though.

Twenty years ago, we had started having big language conferences. JavaOne was like a religious revival or political rally, but C was the old devil being vanquished, not the Hope of the Future. And Visual-J++ and C# conferences were counter-political rallies, where C was going away as both sides agreed, but to be replaced by what? The makers of C tools still filled plenty of booths at the hardware expos, but there wasn't much demand for a C conference where we could hear, in person, about how C wasn't actually dead yet.

And by 15 years ago, all the hotness that inspires a crowd to gather for a conference was based on changes relevant to the WWW. If C had reinvented itself with shiny, new async networking, web service & e-commerce building blocks, concurrency, and whatever in its standard libraries or some such approach, there definitely WOULD have been C conferences. That would have been big news (and probably a bad choice, but that's a different question.) Without something like that, there is still plenty of demand for C, but little demand for a C conference.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#373

Post by baby »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #355
baby wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people would switch to Rust and stop writing C the world would probably be a safer place yes.

It's possible to write unsafe code in any language.

Come on... C doesn't initialize memory, doesn't manage memory, doesn't verify bounds for buffers, etc.

It's especially unsafe to write C.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#374

Post by dman »

baby wrote: post #373
SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible to write unsafe code in any language.

Come on... C doesn't initialize memory, doesn't manage memory, doesn't verify bounds for buffers, etc. It's especially unsafe to write C.

Thats why we have Java / Rust / Python / CSharp.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#376

Post by kkarakk »

dTal wrote: post #356
simias wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"C-monkey"

C-slug

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#377

Post by saagarjha »

monocasa wrote: post #198
saagarjha wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might because they are targeting Embedded C++, which explicitly eschews these features.

Full C++11 support has been on their roadmap for years. http://e2e.ti.com/support/tools/ccs/f/81/t/542711 And IMO, the final Embedded C++ spec is such a terrible idea that it doesn't absolve them. Having written a C++14 RTOS, if I had to give up multiple inheritance, namespaces, sane casts, and templates, I would have just written the damn thing in C to start off with. The value proposition of institutionalized C wit…

You may want to take a look at Apple's Embedded C++ implementation for I/O Kit, which is grounded strongly in object-oriented programming and inheritance: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/De.... Of course, it does drop the very features you seem to enjoy, namely multiple inheritance, namespaces, and templates, but I think there is more reason to this apart from "these things are complicated to implement/hard to use"–I/O Kit was based on NeXTSTEP's DriverKit, which was written in Objective-C and offered none of these features.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#378

Post by saagarjha »

ManDeJan wrote: post #325
saagarjha wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might because they are targeting Embedded C++, which explicitly eschews these features.

Template metaprogramming is very useful on embedded :) https://github.com/kvasir-io/kvasir

I've only glanced at this, but this caught my eye:

> The header only nature of Kvasir and very sophisticated use of the volatile keyword

This isn't a particularly encouraging sign…

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#380

Post by baby »

dman wrote: post #379
baby wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point.

So we agree that we have different tools with different tradeoffs?

Of course, for now. But I still disagree that it is as easy (or hard) to write C without bugs as in any other languages. Most people should not write C.
Post reply on HN