Two types of C programmers
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Two types of C programmers
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Re: Two types of C programmers
#2The post is kind of confusing regarding which sort is the "first sort", because they are presented in one order in the provocative thesis, and in the other order in the following paragraphs.
But:
> My perception of the second sort of C programmer is that if they've moved to any more recent mainstream language, it's probably Rust.
If in this context the "second sort" is the type who likes C on its own merits (rather than because they don't have any other choice), I think Zig is a much better option than Rust.
Re: Two types of C programmers
#3[flagged]
Re: Two types of C programmers
#4[flagged]
… and those who mistake it for trinary.
Re: Two types of C programmers
#5I'd consider myself the former: I use C because it's the only viable option for what I'm doing - but most of the time it's nothing to do with C itself, but the various extensions and builtins of GCC. It's the inline asm, the control of registers, placement of code and data, control of inlining, etc, which are missing from all of the C "replacements". The replacements assume you are building a user application on top of an existing unix-like OS or VM, but they're missing the parts necessary to write the OS or VM itself. They don't provide simple ways to use hardware-specific features.
Obviously there is C++ which can leverage most of this too, but C++ traps you into an ABI which is difficult to use from any language which is not C++.
Re: Two types of C programmers
#6I also mostly use other languages these days, but there's still something about C that always feels like coming home to me. Maybe it's because it's what I used during my apprenticeship which is where the magic of programming finally clicked for me (after a failed attempt taking a programming class). Maybe it's just the simplicity and lack of rules to learn.
Re: Two types of C programmers
#7I used C for my own just in time compiler because I wanted to learn C.
I still don't "know" C or what's a customary way of doing things because I only started with C code by Martin Jacob that executes machine code in a memory buffer ( https://gist.github.com/martinjacobd/3ee56f3c7b7ce621034ec3e... ) and some Perl Compatible Regular Expression library example C file.
I want to know C enough that I can create good APIs in it and transpile to C effectively because I want to take advantage of LLVM and gcc optimising backends.
Re: Two types of C programmers
#8It's interesting that C has managed to remain relatively stable whilst everything else has ballooned in size. I spend most of my time writing C# and it has become quite large. I wouldn't want to pick it up from scratch now.
Re: Two types of C programmers
#9I also mostly use other languages these days, but there's still something about C that always feels like coming home to me. Maybe it's because it's what I used during my apprenticeship which is where the magic of programming finally clicked for me (after a failed attempt taking a programming class). Maybe it's just the simplicity and lack of rules to learn.
the simplicity of c is an illusion the moment you start using pointers and define macros. nothing is harder to understand than a big C program, imo