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C isn't a programming language anymore (2022)

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Re: C isn't a programming language anymore (2022)

#21

Post by pizlonator »

munificent wrote: post #16
pizlonator wrote: post #7

It’s weird how whiny this post is. Like there’s zero intellectual curiosity about why C got this way, and why C gets to be the foundation for how systems software is written. I could write a whole essay about why, but now isn’t the time. I’m just going to enjoy the fact that TFA and the author don’t get it.

> why C gets to be the foundation for how systems software is written. Is there an answer here more interesting than "it's what Unix and Windows were written in, so that's how programs talked to the OS, and once you have an interface, it's impossible to change"?

Yes

Re: C isn't a programming language anymore (2022)

#22

Post by agentultra »

I mean… an ABI is more like an agreement. It isn’t a specification. It’d be nice if everything was neatly specified and sound. But as the author notes near the end… there’s a lot of platforms and they all have their own quirks.

There has to be an ABI that has to be agreed upon by everyone. Otherwise there wouldn’t be any interoperability. And if we didn’t have the SystemV ABI — what would we use instead? Prepare for a long debate as every language author, operating system designer, and platform under the sun argues for their respective demands and proposals. And as sure as the sun rises in the East someone, somewhere, would write an article such as this one decrying that blessed ABI.

SystemV shouldn’t be the be all and end all, IMO. But progress should be incremental. Because a lingua franca loses its primary feature and utility when we all return to our own fiefdoms and stop talking to one another in the common tongue.

It’s a pain in the metaphorical butt. But it’s better, IMO, than the alternatives. It’s kind of neat that SystemV works so well let alone at all.

Re: C isn't a programming language anymore (2022)

#23

Post by kogasa240p »

okanat wrote: post #6
nacozarina wrote: post #3

None of the alternatives have stability. What was exemplary & idiomatic rust pre-pandemic would be churlish & rejected now and the toolchain use would be different anyway. Carpenters, plumbers, masons & electricians work on houses 3-300 yrs old, navigate the range of legacy styles & tech they encounter, and predictably get good outcomes. Only C has, yet, given use that level of serviceability. C99, baby, why pay more…

The replacement has already happened. It is HTTP and JSON for 99% of the software developed today. The reason C stayed has multiple reasons but most obvious ones are for me are: - People just stopped caring about operating systems research and systems programming after ~2005. Actual engineering implementations of the concepts largely stopped after the second half of 90s. Most developers moved on to making websites or…

>Culture changed. We cared more about stability, repairability and reusability. Computers were expensive. So are programmers and software. Now computers are cheap. Our culture is more consumerist than ever. The mentality of "move fast and break things" permeated so well with economic policy and the zeitgeist. With AI it will get worse. So trying to make a real alternative to C (as a generic low level OS protocol) has reduced cultural value / optics. It doesn't fill the CVs as well.

IMO I do see this changing in the future as higher power computers become expensive once again, and I'm not just referring to the recent chip shortage.

Re: C isn't a programming language anymore (2022)

#24

Post by SanjayMehta »

mjg59 wrote: post #19

I really don't understand why people keep misunderstanding this post so badly. It's not a complaint about C as a programming language. It's a complaint that, due to so much infrastructure being implemented in C, anyone who wants to interact with that infrastructure is forced to deal with some of the constraints of C. C has moved beyond merely being a programming language and become the most common interface for in-pr…

VHDL vs Verilog is a good parallel from the chip world. VHDL was designed from ground up.

Verilog is loosely based on C. Most designs are done in Verilog.

Re: C isn't a programming language anymore (2022)

#25

Post by munificent »

pizlonator wrote: post #21
munificent wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why C gets to be the foundation for how systems software is written. Is there an answer here more interesting than "it's what Unix and Windows were written in, so that's how programs talked to the OS, and once you have an interface, it's impossible to change"?

Yes

Care to share the answer with the rest of the class?

Re: C isn't a programming language anymore (2022)

#27

Post by heyitsdaad »

munificent wrote: post #20
jonjacky wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't a coincidence, or an accident. C was specifically designed to write Unix, by people who had experience with a lot of other computer languages, and had programmed other operating systems including Multics and some earlier versions of Unix. They knew exactly what they were doing, and exactly what they wanted.

I'm not sure what you mean by "coincidence" or "accident" here. C is a pretty OK language for writing an OS in the 70s. UNIX got popular for reasons I think largely orthogonal to being written in C. UNIX was one of the first operating systems that was widely licensed to universities. Students were obliged to learn C to work with it. If the Macintosh OS had come out first and taken over the world, we'd probably all be…

First to market is not necessarily the best, case in point: many video sites existed before Youtube, including ones based on Apple Quicktime. But in the end Flash won.

To me it looks like there is a better way to do things and the better one eventually wins.

Re: C isn't a programming language anymore (2022)

#28

Post by yunnpp »

pizlonator wrote: post #7

It’s weird how whiny this post is. Like there’s zero intellectual curiosity about why C got this way, and why C gets to be the foundation for how systems software is written. I could write a whole essay about why, but now isn’t the time. I’m just going to enjoy the fact that TFA and the author don’t get it.

The writing is terrible and full of fluff. Maybe the cat logo should have been a warning.

Re: C isn't a programming language anymore (2022)

#29

Post by drnick1 »

mjg59 wrote: post #19

I really don't understand why people keep misunderstanding this post so badly. It's not a complaint about C as a programming language. It's a complaint that, due to so much infrastructure being implemented in C, anyone who wants to interact with that infrastructure is forced to deal with some of the constraints of C. C has moved beyond merely being a programming language and become the most common interface for in-pr…

I don't see that as a problem. C has been the bedrock of computing since the 1970s because it is the most minimal way of speaking to the hardware in a mostly portable way. Anything can be done in C, from writing hardware drivers, to GUI applications and scientific computing. In fact I deplore the day people stopped using C for desktop applications and moved to bloated, sluggish Web frameworks to program desktop apps. Today's desktop apps are slower than Windows 95 era GUI programs because of that.

Re: C isn't a programming language anymore (2022)

#30

Post by trueismywork »

okanat wrote: post #6
nacozarina wrote: post #3

None of the alternatives have stability. What was exemplary & idiomatic rust pre-pandemic would be churlish & rejected now and the toolchain use would be different anyway. Carpenters, plumbers, masons & electricians work on houses 3-300 yrs old, navigate the range of legacy styles & tech they encounter, and predictably get good outcomes. Only C has, yet, given use that level of serviceability. C99, baby, why pay more…

The replacement has already happened. It is HTTP and JSON for 99% of the software developed today. The reason C stayed has multiple reasons but most obvious ones are for me are: - People just stopped caring about operating systems research and systems programming after ~2005. Actual engineering implementations of the concepts largely stopped after the second half of 90s. Most developers moved on to making websites or…

Name me a stable binary interface that is not ints and arrays of ints
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