To be perfectly blunt, C does not need Zed Shaw "saving" it. He can go ahead and ignore it or end his book or rewrite the chapter or spout his vitriol over how stupid C programmers are; nothing he does will make an impact.
We have CVE for that.
Deconstructing K&R C Is Dead (2015)
41–50 of 190 posts
Re: Deconstructing K&R C Is Dead (2015)
#42I have mixed feelings about this, but I cannot disagree with it. a. I haven't written a program in C in over 10 years. I wrote software 5 days a week for those 10 years. b. I wouldn't want to write a program in C now. c. The first "high level" programming language I learned was C, from a book (not K&R C), while travelling in Asia, without a computer. It taught me well, but I immediately went on to other languages. e.…
> a. I haven't written a program in C in over 10 years. I wrote software 5 days a week for those 10 years.
That's fine. Perhaps the kind of programs you have been writing and not a good fit for what C is great at doing. That does not take away from C or its use for appropriate work.
Re: Deconstructing K&R C Is Dead (2015)
#43I can't really speak for Zed's expertise and/or value to the programming community. From what I gather, a few of his projects are widely used (Mongrel comes to mind), and he seems to know his stuff pretty well. I also identify strongly with his Programming Motherfucker[0] rant. But man, the guy is insecure to the point of requiring therapy or something. He seems obsessed with his image and status, and the slightest c…
In commenting on how Zed thinks too much about his self-image, you criticise how he comes across image-wise...
Re: Deconstructing K&R C Is Dead (2015)
#44You had my sympathy until I read the "error prone shitty language like C".
Next time before getting pissed off about the response you get, think what could it be that you have said or done that may have triggered it.
Re: Deconstructing K&R C Is Dead (2015)
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lots more will be written until there is a viable replacement for C in embedded systems.
Exactly. It's beyond my authority to change the language in use, but I would love to have alternatives to argue for. C isn't a terrible option, or is perhaps the least terrible option, but it's not leaving my corner of the corporate universe until a proven alternative establishes itself.
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Re: Deconstructing K&R C Is Dead (2015)
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. It's beyond my authority to change the language in use, but I would love to have alternatives to argue for. C isn't a terrible option, or is perhaps the least terrible option, but it's not leaving my corner of the corporate universe until a proven alternative establishes itself.
What in particular makes Rust (or Go or Swift) unsuitable?
Go is unsuitable as a replacement for C because it is garbage collected. End of discussion.
Rust is unsuitable as a replacement for C because its memory management is poorly thought out (ie. its a joke). Here's the relevant paragraphs from the Rust FAQ. Really?
"Rust avoids the need for GC through its system of ownership and borrowing, but that same system helps with a host of other problems, including resource management in general and concurrency.
For when single ownership does not suffice, Rust programs rely on the standard reference-counting smart pointer type, Rc, and its thread-safe counterpart, Arc, instead of GC.
We are however investigating optional garbage collection as a future extension. The goal is to enable smooth integration with garbage-collected runtimes, such as those offered by the Spidermonkey and V8 JavaScript engines. Finally, some people have investigated implementing pure Rust garbage collectors without compiler support."
Re: Deconstructing K&R C Is Dead (2015)
#47To me, C is like PHP (ignoring for a moment that PHP was written in C).
You can document its shortcomings, its dangers and all the headache-inducing choices. But while you're doing that, people all over the world are building wonderful and terrible things with it.
So you've moving on to Go or Rust? Great! Good choices! But remember that there are people who may disagree and be wrong and also do something interesting with that wrongness.
Re: Deconstructing K&R C Is Dead (2015)
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. It's beyond my authority to change the language in use, but I would love to have alternatives to argue for. C isn't a terrible option, or is perhaps the least terrible option, but it's not leaving my corner of the corporate universe until a proven alternative establishes itself.
What in particular makes Rust (or Go or Swift) unsuitable?
Ironic, but the one think they are missing is an easy convenient way to call C libraries.
Rust is very promising language, but unless you plan to write everything from scratch, you have to depend on 3rd party driver implementations for most stuff. Databases for example. There isn't a single database vendor that has Rust drivers.
Re: Deconstructing K&R C Is Dead (2015)
#49I have mixed feelings about this, but I cannot disagree with it. a. I haven't written a program in C in over 10 years. I wrote software 5 days a week for those 10 years. b. I wouldn't want to write a program in C now. c. The first "high level" programming language I learned was C, from a book (not K&R C), while travelling in Asia, without a computer. It taught me well, but I immediately went on to other languages. e.…
I use it all the time in embedded systems. It's very common. Basically there is no good alternatives until you get to much bigger chipsets. However in the embedded world you tend to go with a limited subset of C. Especially no use of dynamic memory.
Re: Deconstructing K&R C Is Dead (2015)
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
What in particular makes Rust (or Go or Swift) unsuitable?
Go is unsuitable as a replacement for C because it is garbage collected. End of discussion. Rust is unsuitable as a replacement for C because its memory management is poorly thought out (ie. its a joke). Here's the relevant paragraphs from the Rust FAQ. Really? "Rust avoids the need for GC through its system of ownership and borrowing, but that same system helps with a host of other problems, including resource manag…
You don't describe why you think it's a joke.