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Why Aren't There C Conferences?

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Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#31

Post by zhobbs »

mrpippy wrote: post #5

Related tweet from last week: https://twitter.com/krzyzanowskim/status/1062740353533513728 Observation: Before 2014, iOS conferences were iOS conferences and was mostly about how to use the frameworks. After 2014, iOS conferences renamed to Swift conferences and everyone tries to figure out how to use Swift - like this is the main pain point or what?

Probably useful for justifying costs to managers if your company is currently migrating to Swift, which is pretty common in iOS shops at the time (and now?)

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#33

Post by news_to_me »

ddevault wrote: post #14
ndesaulniers wrote: post #3

Good question, but a majority of this post is links to cppcon videos. (I do appreciate the shoutout to LLVM). I think the C community: * Should have a C conference. * Actually be more aggressive in adding features to the language. For example, there are some really great GNU C extensions that are long overdue be added to the standard. Compiler vendors should work with the standards bodies more, rather than shipping l…

I strongly disagree. C should is adding langauge features at a pace other languages could stand to emulate. C is stable, trusted, and supported everywhere for this very reason. Codebases should not be using extensions, and Linux is wrong to do so.

> Codebases should not be using extensions, and Linux is wrong to do so.

Poppycock. Codebases should use any and all tools available to them to accomplish their goals, given the tradeoffs. Using non-standard language extensions is a tradeoff, and if it suits the Linux community and their goals, there's nothing wrong with that.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#34

Post by ndesaulniers »

ddevault wrote: post #14
ndesaulniers wrote: post #3

Good question, but a majority of this post is links to cppcon videos. (I do appreciate the shoutout to LLVM). I think the C community: * Should have a C conference. * Actually be more aggressive in adding features to the language. For example, there are some really great GNU C extensions that are long overdue be added to the standard. Compiler vendors should work with the standards bodies more, rather than shipping l…

I strongly disagree. C should is adding langauge features at a pace other languages could stand to emulate. C is stable, trusted, and supported everywhere for this very reason. Codebases should not be using extensions, and Linux is wrong to do so.

> C should is adding langauge features at a pace other languages could stand to emulate.

Remember the Vasa! ;)

> C is stable, trusted, and supported everywhere for this very reason.

See the sibling comment about C not being fully supported everywhere. As long as people continue to make proprietary compilers, there will be implementation deficiencies. That's orthogonal to the language itself.

> Codebases should not be using extensions,

Agree and disagree. Maybe "codebases should only use extensions when it's feasible to provide fallbacks" or something.

> and Linux is wrong to do so.

I'm not sure I agree. There are some worthwhile extensions IMO, which is why I made the point earlier that I think it's time to standardize them.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#36

Post by mikestew »

kayoone wrote: post #26
mikestew wrote: post #19

Because though there might be building trades conferences, there are no hammer conferences. Oh, there will be tool vendors at the building trades conferences, there might be sessions on "Efficient Hammering Techniques Using Machine Learning", but there are no conferences about hammers. Don't forget about the blacksmith conference next week, they'll have hammer vendors, too. I dunno, a Ruby conference kinda makes sens…

i don't know, there are Golang, Python, Javascript, Ruby, PHP conferences and probably a lot more, so not sure if that argument is valid.

Of the ones you list, only one has a wide focus, IMO. Three of those will essentially be web development conferences, and I don't know what the hell people do with Go these days, but I'll bet it's mostly a handful of things. Python probably has broad enough usage and scope to counter what I said. The exception proves the rule. :-)

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#37

Post by deminature »

Apocryphon wrote: post #30
deminature wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, they're still about frameworks mostly, they just brand themselves as Swift conferences to indicate there isn't going to be any Objective-C oriented content presented, so people don't attend with the wrong expectation. Swift-oriented content at a conference is also going to be popular, as unlike frameworks, it affects every developer, as compared to frameworks where only a percentage may use each one…

I wonder if there might still be new Objective-C content that could be presented for iOS development, or if everything is just Swift now.

A lot of major apps are still Objective-C codebases (Facebook, Spotify), though I would imagine everyone will migrate eventually, considering the momentum of open source libraries seems to be heading that way. As someone who works fulltime in Swift and previously in Objective-C, I'm slightly nostalgic for the days of long, descriptive method names, and faster compile times, but overall glad to have migrated.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#38

Post by svat »

It's interesting that many of the comments here (7 of 9 top-level comments currently) answer the question in the title, rather than respond to the blog post (which has some interesting points and a great list of relevant talks from conferences... starting to watch some of them right away).

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#39

Post by perl4ever »

zacharytelschow wrote: post #29

Same reason there aren't B Batteries - because you could never be sure if someone had a stutter.

I think there are B batteries, they are just obscure compared to C and A.

According to a cursory check of Wikipedia, a lantern battery such as "Energizer 3LR12 4.5 V Max Battery" sold in the UK contains three of what may be known as B cells.

Incidentally, someone once told me he had experience in "C+" programming and I've never been sure if he was joking.

Re: Why Aren't There C Conferences?

#40

Post by lettergram »

mikestew wrote: post #36
kayoone wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i don't know, there are Golang, Python, Javascript, Ruby, PHP conferences and probably a lot more, so not sure if that argument is valid.

Of the ones you list, only one has a wide focus, IMO. Three of those will essentially be web development conferences, and I don't know what the hell people do with Go these days, but I'll bet it's mostly a handful of things. Python probably has broad enough usage and scope to counter what I said. The exception proves the rule. :-)

Python is probably mostly data science if I had to guess. jupyter notebooks have made python excessively used for data science.
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