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The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

damienkatz.net

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Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#11

Post by theootz »

cageface wrote: post #2

C is a fantastic high level language. Nonsense. This sudden C fad is totally baffling to me. C is a great language for low-level work and it does have an attractive minimal elegance but is in absolutely no sense of the term a high level language . A language with next to no standard containers or algorithms, manual memory management, raw pointers, a barely functional string type and minimal standard library and concu…

C is (more specifically) a 3rd generation language, and when I was going through high school I remember it always being on the list of high level languages. It's more recently now I think, that we consider it otherwise...

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#12

Post by seiji »

cageface wrote: post #2

C is a fantastic high level language. Nonsense. This sudden C fad is totally baffling to me. C is a great language for low-level work and it does have an attractive minimal elegance but is in absolutely no sense of the term a high level language . A language with next to no standard containers or algorithms, manual memory management, raw pointers, a barely functional string type and minimal standard library and concu…

In traditional circles (read: not rubymongojs land), C is considered a high level language because you aren't writing assembly or maintaining stacks by hand.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#13

Post by afandian »

cageface wrote: post #2

C is a fantastic high level language. Nonsense. This sudden C fad is totally baffling to me. C is a great language for low-level work and it does have an attractive minimal elegance but is in absolutely no sense of the term a high level language . A language with next to no standard containers or algorithms, manual memory management, raw pointers, a barely functional string type and minimal standard library and concu…

It's not particularly controversial to say that C is a high-level language. Maybe a bit historical, but it hasn't lost any features since it was new and ultra-high-level for its time.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#14

Post by timbre »

cageface wrote: post #2

C is a fantastic high level language. Nonsense. This sudden C fad is totally baffling to me. C is a great language for low-level work and it does have an attractive minimal elegance but is in absolutely no sense of the term a high level language . A language with next to no standard containers or algorithms, manual memory management, raw pointers, a barely functional string type and minimal standard library and concu…

The author makes the point more effectively when he writes "It's blown everything else away to the point it's moved the bar and redefined what we think of as a low level language."

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#15

Post by Thrymr »

cageface wrote: post #2

C is a fantastic high level language. Nonsense. This sudden C fad is totally baffling to me. C is a great language for low-level work and it does have an attractive minimal elegance but is in absolutely no sense of the term a high level language . A language with next to no standard containers or algorithms, manual memory management, raw pointers, a barely functional string type and minimal standard library and concu…

> C... is in absolutely no sense of the term a high level language.

Of course it is. You're not worrying about how many registers your CPU has, or when you swap a register out to memory. All that has been abstracted away for you. The fact that you can access memory locations directly gives you some low-level access, but in a very real sense C is a high-level language. There are higher-level languages with more abstraction, of course. From the article: "It's not as high level as Java or C#, and certainly no where near as high level as Erlang, Python, or Javascript."

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#16

Post by theootz »

henrik_w wrote: post #10
skrebbel wrote: post #3

To nitpick on a single statement: > C has the fastest development interactivity of any mainstream statically typed language. What? Despite all its shortcomings, Java in a modern IDE effectively has zero build time. The level of interactivity is as fast as that of interpreted languages. I haven't seen anyone manage this with C yet.

Agree completely about zero build time! I've been using IntelliJ IDEA for Java development for the last 4 years, and before that I used C and C++ using Emacs for 7 years. I am way more productive in IntelliJ IDEA than I was before. One reason is the instant feedback on syntax errors when I type the code. I don't need to compile to see them, as I used to in C and C++. Another reason is the navigation support you get i…

Eclipse+CDT provides some of the same features as well. Very useful :)

http://www.eclipse.org/cdt/

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#18

Post by alexkus »

henrik_w wrote: post #10
skrebbel wrote: post #3

To nitpick on a single statement: > C has the fastest development interactivity of any mainstream statically typed language. What? Despite all its shortcomings, Java in a modern IDE effectively has zero build time. The level of interactivity is as fast as that of interpreted languages. I haven't seen anyone manage this with C yet.

Agree completely about zero build time! I've been using IntelliJ IDEA for Java development for the last 4 years, and before that I used C and C++ using Emacs for 7 years. I am way more productive in IntelliJ IDEA than I was before. One reason is the instant feedback on syntax errors when I type the code. I don't need to compile to see them, as I used to in C and C++. Another reason is the navigation support you get i…

That's the IDE not the language.

Java, itself, does not highlight your syntax errors. Nor does C.

There are IDEs out there that will do exactly the same thing for you for your C code.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#19

Post by munin »

jsaxton86 wrote: post #9
cageface wrote: post #2

C is a fantastic high level language. Nonsense. This sudden C fad is totally baffling to me. C is a great language for low-level work and it does have an attractive minimal elegance but is in absolutely no sense of the term a high level language . A language with next to no standard containers or algorithms, manual memory management, raw pointers, a barely functional string type and minimal standard library and concu…

You can wind up with "an unmaintanable mess riddled with security holes" in any language -- that's not unique to C. Regarding the flaws you have mentioned in C: Its flaws are very very well known, and this is a virtue. All languages and implementations have gotchas and hangups. C is just far more upfront about it. And there are a ton of static and runtime tools to help you deal with the most common and dangerous mist…

Security holes you wind up with in a Java or whatever codebase take the form of logic errors allowing for compromise of user information, or SQL injection or command injection. These are bad, they totally compromise data and systems.

Security holes in C applications allow for the injection of low-level programs. This is way more annoying, IMO.

also the static and runtime tools for C are good, and getting better, but still very far from being a replacement for writing code in a memory-safe language.

Re: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

#20

Post by manish_gill »

stcredzero wrote: post #8

1) Pick a popular language 2) Figure out something controversial to say about it and a justification for that 3) Write it up and post it to reddit, HN, &c 4) Enjoy the hits EDIT: Which is enabled by this - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5037649

Pretty much this. Instead of reading about how awesome C is, I would much rather read a concrete example of a problem which you were facing and how you used C to solve it. Get to learn something in the process.
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