I know C(#), it counts right? ;)
You forgot the tags
Poll: Do you know C?
61–70 of 208 posts
Re: Poll: Do you know C?
#62I've been programming in C for longer than my current manager has been alive. :-)
Not sure if that's a good thing. I wouldn't say the same for a comment on another site (different things drive different people), but I assume you have some aspirations to make it and be your own boss.
Jesus, you're reading a lot into this one comment! For all you know kabdib could be Ken Thompson and his manager could be Larry Page.
Re: Poll: Do you know C?
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure if that's a good thing. I wouldn't say the same for a comment on another site (different things drive different people), but I assume you have some aspirations to make it and be your own boss.
Jesus, you're reading a lot into this one comment! For all you know kabdib could be Ken Thompson and his manager could be Larry Page.
Yes, that's why I said "Not sure".
Re: Poll: Do you know C?
#64I have a lot of respect for C and every once in a while I open up the K & R and go through a few chapters. While I find this to be really well written and holds up even for today's standard of programming book, I feel like the resources for beginner C online are pretty slim.
I think my primary use for knowing some C would be writing C extensions for Ruby or looking at some source code of classic C libraries.
Re: Poll: Do you know C?
#65I'm from the "Modern C++" school. I learned C++ without first learning C. I don't consider myself a C programmer. Of course, I can read and write C code, but I would consider it a burden to code without smart pointers, templates and exceptions. How should I answer this poll?
You don't know C. Coding in C and C++ has diverged significantly enough that they are two completely different languages. That said, answer #3 or #4 makes sense.
I said I would consider it a burden to write in pure C, not that I would not be able to do it. I would not need any documentation, but I would scratch my head figuring out how to organize a large program. I would need to write a lot of comments to replace things that do not exist in the language: const-correctness, memory management conventions, type-safe containers, etc.
Re: Poll: Do you know C?
#66I don't use C for any personal projects and only occasionally at work, but I read K&R once a year. It's a fantastic book.
Re: Poll: Do you know C?
#67I used C exclusively for ten years - then I fell in love with Perl and never really looked back. Garbage collection was my downfall.
That is interesting, whyy do you say that garbage collection was your downfall?
A lot of my time in C was spent on memory management - when I switched to Perl it all went away. (I had some libraries I'd written to take care of it by then, of course, but in Perl I just didn't have to worry about cleaning up at all!) Oh - and strings! (But that's also a memory management question.) And regexp.
CPAN grew on me later - roughly as CPAN was growing. It was garbage collection that was my deciding factor.
Re: Poll: Do you know C?
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm 30, and from Googling you seem to be 3 years older than me, but I don't think the use case for learning C has changed all that much over the course of my time as a programmer. Already around '95 or so Perl was widely used, GUIs could be done in things like Tcl/Tk, basic apps were starting to move onto the web, desktop stuff was mostly in C++. You learned C when you wanted to work on things like kernels or databas…
I don't know if you remember, but in 1995, Serious Software was still Not Written in "Scripting Languages". Things like SATAN and HotJava were avant-garde exceptions, and Emacs Lisp was a holdover from another era (and we often used vi instead because it was noticeably faster). Today, I regularly use an email client written mostly in JS, message boards written entirely in Python, a chat client written in Python, a hi…
Tcl was being used for all manner of "serious" stuff in 1995 - including EPOS systems.
Re: Poll: Do you know C?
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know if you remember, but in 1995, Serious Software was still Not Written in "Scripting Languages". Things like SATAN and HotJava were avant-garde exceptions, and Emacs Lisp was a holdover from another era (and we often used vi instead because it was noticeably faster). Today, I regularly use an email client written mostly in JS, message boards written entirely in Python, a chat client written in Python, a hi…
Tcl was driving oil extractions plants in 1995... just an example, also there were bit perl programs in production, so for sure now the acceptance is higher but was not impossible to have sensible code written in scripting languages back then.
It wasn't impossible in 1985, either, when GNU Emacs came out; but the now-common AlternateSoftAndHardLayers approach won Emacs a reputation for being a slow memory hog.
My point, though, is that much of C's 1995 or 1996 niche is now occupied by "scripting languages", and in 1995 or 1996, that niche was occupied by C.
Re: Poll: Do you know C?
#70I'm hoping that I never have to write C/C++ or use vim/emacs extensively during my programming career. I'm perfectly content to leave that work to someone else.