I stopped everything and started writing C again
1–10 of 475 posts
Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again
#2The point is that much of the defensive programming you would have to do in C is unnecessary and automatic in Rust.
Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again
#3So this is a journey where starting in ruby, going through an SICP phase, and then eventually compromising that it isn't viable. it kinda seems like C is just the personal compromise of trying to maintain nerdiness rather than any specific performance needs.
I think it's a pretty normal pattern I've seen (and been though) of learning-oriented development rather than thoughtful engineering.
But personally, AI coding has pushed me full circle back to ruby. Who wants to mentally interpret generated C code which could have optimisations and could also have fancy looking bugs. Why would anyone want to try disambiguating those when they could just read ruby like English?
Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again
#4[flagged]
Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again
#5[flagged]
Except complexity of language
Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again
#6So this is a journey where starting in ruby, going through an SICP phase, and then eventually compromising that it isn't viable. it kinda seems like C is just the personal compromise of trying to maintain nerdiness rather than any specific performance needs. I think it's a pretty normal pattern I've seen (and been though) of learning-oriented development rather than thoughtful engineering. But personally, AI coding h…
> But personally, AI coding has pushed me full circle back to ruby.
This happened to me too. I’m using Python in a project right now purely because it’s easier for the AI to generate and easier for me to verify. AI coding saves me a lot of time, but the code is such low quality there’s no way I’d ever trust it to generate C.
Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again
#7Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again
#8I started programming with C a long time ago, and even now, every few months, I dream of going back to those roots. It was so simple. You wrote code, you knew roughly which instructions it translated to, and there you went!
Then I try actually going through the motions of writing a production-grade application in C and I realise why I left it behind all those years ago. There's just so much stuff one has to do on one's own, with no support from the computer. So many things that one has to get just right for it to work across edge cases and in the face of adversarial users.
If I had to pick up a low-level language today, it'd likely be Ada. Similar to C, but with much more help from the compiler with all sorts of things.
Re: I stopped everything and started writing C again
#9So this is a journey where starting in ruby, going through an SICP phase, and then eventually compromising that it isn't viable. it kinda seems like C is just the personal compromise of trying to maintain nerdiness rather than any specific performance needs. I think it's a pretty normal pattern I've seen (and been though) of learning-oriented development rather than thoughtful engineering. But personally, AI coding h…
> But personally, AI coding has pushed me full circle back to ruby. This happened to me too. I’m using Python in a project right now purely because it’s easier for the AI to generate and easier for me to verify. AI coding saves me a lot of time, but the code is such low quality there’s no way I’d ever trust it to generate C.
> AI coding saves me a lot of time, but the code is such low quality
Given that low quality code is perhaps the biggest time-sink relating to our work, I'm struggling to reconcile these statements?