this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
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C Programming Language

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Welcome to the C community!

C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.
... When I read commentary about suggestions for where C should go, I often think back and give thanks that it wasn't developed under the advice of a worldwide crowd.
... The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.

Β© Dennis Ritchie

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Ode to C (self.c_lang)
submitted 9 months ago by modev to c/c_lang
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Personally, I have nothing against the emergence of new programming languages. This is cool:

  • the industry does not stand still
  • competition allows existing languages to develop and borrow features from new ones
  • developers have the opportunity to learn new things while avoiding burnout
  • there is a choice for beginners
  • there is a choice for specific tasks

But why do most people dislike the C language so much? But it remains the fastest among high-level languages. Who benefits from C being suppressed and attempts being made to replace him? I think there is only one answer - companies. Not developers. Developers are already reproducing the opinion imposed on them by the market. Under the influence of hype and the opinions of others, they form the idea that C is a useless language. And most importantly, oh my god, he's unsafe. Memory usage. But you as a programmer are (and must be) responsible for the code you write, not a language. And the one way not to do bugs - not doing them.

Personally, I also like the Nim language. Its performance is comparable to C, but its syntax and elegance are more modern.

And in general, I’m not against new languages, it’s a matter of taste. But when you learn a language, write in it for a while, and then realize that you are burning out 10 times faster than before, you realize the cost of memory safety.

This is that cost:

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[–] modev 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Why did you forgot Nim? Is it a player?

[–] BatmanAoD 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Oh, Nim is possibly even a better example because it is "transpiled" rather than compiled, meaning the compiler actually generates C or C++ code. You can then compile that with whatever compiler you want. However, I don't know of any major projects in Nim to compare against ones in C, C++, Rust, etc.

Edit: and Zig should be extremely efficient as well.