Why I Still Like C

http://mitchgolden.com/essays/psychotic/psychotic10.txt

by hypermatt • 18 years ago

43 51 18 years ago

tialys• 18 years ago

I've just finished my freshman Java class and was severely disillusioned at how far from 'programming' it felt. I picked up a copy of K&R and have been enjoying myself since. I actually feel bad for my fellow majors who think that Java/OOP is the only way that things can be done.

jrockway7• 18 years ago

I actually feel bad for my fellow majors who think that Java/OOP is the only way that things can be done.

I feel bad for people that think imperative-style programming is the only way things can be done.

C is not the anti-Java. It's Java minus modern features and with more rope to hang yourself with. (Then again, someone actually told me that spending an entire day with Valgrind hunting down a memory leak was fun.)

If you want power, non-Java-ness, and modern features, learn a language like Lisp, Haskell, OCaml, etc. And learn Perl for actually getting things done.

ConradHex• 18 years ago

Party pooper.

There's nothing wrong with learning and using C. It may not be your favorite flavor, but it's a perfectly valid and reasonable choice.

tx2• 18 years ago

... meanwhile the entire Internet is powered by software written in C, including the very same browser you typed this message in.

I've been hearing how obsolete C is ever since high school (1994) yet pieces of successful programs not written in C-family is an order of magnitude less common: everything form web-servers to browsers, OSes and office suites and imaging software - all C. Meanwhile I've never had to install JVM on any of my computers, somehow I never run across a single piece of useful software written in Java (with exception of evaluating Jython and toying with Eclipse&Netbeans at work).

Perhaps it's running on my phone. If so, that's probably why the damn thing feels so anemic compared to Objective-C powered iPhone.

I don't know how C programmers do it, but somehow they just get things done.

Moreover, C remains the only choice of writing the most portable code ever. There isn't a reasonably popular CPU on this planet that doesn't have a C compiler for it, while Java runs only on "java computers".

d0mine• 18 years ago

Learning:

You've missed the point. Learning C is not about imperative-style programming. It is about seeing one abstraction level down relative to your favorite programming language.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=235727

Using:

And C is not inferior to Java. They serve different purposes.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=235766

lpgauth2• 18 years ago

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

Java is #1 in the industry. I'm not saying I like it but your school is just trying to make sure you can easily get a job after school.

omouse• 18 years ago

This has been covered elsewhere, but the job of a university isn't to give you what you want. It's to give you perspective and a different way of thinking. If they teach only Java, you're missing out on a lot and you'll only be prepared for Java. On the other hand, if you're taught Haskell, Scheme, Smalltalk, Forth, C, etc. you'll (hopefully) learn how to pick up any language easily and always have a job, even when the industry-standard/popular language changes.

But anyway, no arguing about this because it's been beaten to death (and I just woke up from a nap, don't anger me! :P)

jrockway7• 18 years ago

Most of the article is "why I think learning assembly is important". I don't know assembly, but I do know how computers work (and I even know you have to trigger an interrupt to make a system call). I think he should just get to the point and say "people should learn how the computer works", rather than suggesting that you learn a programming language that makes you aware of some aspects of how a computer works.

It's like a very sharp knife: you can cut yourself as well as whatever it is you're trying to slice. It's really easy to write broken or inflexible code in it.

This is true of all powerful tools. I've seen horribly unmaintainable Lisp and Haskell. I've also seen very clean and maintainable Perl. C is no different than any other programming language, although it does actively discourage good code. You can ignore the discouragement, but why not use a language that encourages maintainability, or at least automatically deallocates memory when you're done using it?

Anyway, I don't think this article shows why the author likes C, or why someone else should learn C. Sure, learn C if you want to learn C. But you can also learn about your computer by just learning about your computer.

IsaacSchlueter3• 18 years ago

Dial your time machine back a few decades, and you'll see assembly programmers telling those C upstarts that they should learn assembly for all the same reasons. A few more, and it's the logic circuit designers griping that you can't trust instruction cards because you can't see the program. A few more, and it's the vacuum tube enthusiasts complaining that digital switches are slower, less reliable, and too small to debug properly.

If you want a visceral relationship with your hardware, get a soldering iron and go to town. That's a respectable hobby, and confers mega geek-points. If you want to write software and be productive at it, learn a real language.

C is a powerful tool, and every programmer should know it. But it's woefully underpowered as a fulltime software development tool.

jrockway7• 18 years ago

Very well said. This was the point I was trying to convey, but you did it better ;)

Anyway, I think programmers think too much in black and white. There are people that say you never need to know how the computer works. Then the rest say that you always need to think about how the computer works. The reality is somewhere in the middle. There have been a few cases in my programming career where knowing how the hardware actually worked was helpful. But it was never critical, just good to know.

(Another similar area is data structures. Yes, it's good to know how merge sort and quick sort and B+ trees work. That direct knowledge has helped me a number of times, either because I needed my own tree or because thinking about how merge sort worked helped me solve a related problem. But the other 99% of the time, I'm not thinking about sorting or the tree balancing algorithm. I just use libraries. So theoretically, it's possible to write good programs without knowing that stuff.)

ajross3• 18 years ago

And you know what? All those curmudgeons were right (except for the bit about vacuum tubes: transistor logic was never slower or less reliable than tubes, ever). If you don't know how your tools are put together, there will be areas of software development at all levels which will forever remain voodoo to you.

You can do an awful lot of useful work while relying on voodoo, but eventually the voodoo will catch up with you and you'll end up with an ugly mess where a better trained developer would produce an elegant hack. That's no less true for a web developer using rails than it is for an embedded systems driver developer.

Basically, I've never known a great hacker who doesn't understand CPU architectures and at least a little bit of digital logic design.

As for C specifically, let's just agree to disagree. I'll put of the sum total of "great hacks" written in C up against any amount of C++ or Java you can find. It's true that for some problems (web development being a good example) there are better tools (scripting languages, databases) for the domain. But that alone doesn't make C "woefully underpowered".

tlrobinson• 18 years ago

I think he's basically saying you should know how computers work, and learning C is a pretty good way to do that.

I like C because it's pretty "close to the metal" but much easier and more portable than assembly. I can usually visualize what's going on under the hood if I need to. That's much harder with higher level languages. And on top of that it's a useful language to know.

Knowing assembly would also help you understand how computers work, even more so than C. But it's not as useful these days.

gaius• 18 years ago

I've also seen very clean and maintainable Perl

Are you sure you just didn't imagine it? ;-)

utnick• 18 years ago

article reminds me of my granddad complaining that us youngsters don't know how to kill and clean chickens because we can just go to the grocery store and buy them already ready to go.

rw2• 18 years ago

Programming is not like murdering chickens.

ken• 18 years ago

Programming in C is maybe a little bit like murdering chickens.

pmjordan• 18 years ago

This isn't crankyness. If you try to generalise the thoughts on asm/C then it boils down to this:

- Abstractions will always be leaky

and

- be prepared for when an abstraction leaks.

As for the ideology part:

think for yourself and try to see beyond the hype

And I have to say I absolutely agree.

For example, I've written maybe a handful of lines of assembly, and maybe as many lines of inline assembly. However, understanding assembly language has saved me many times. Compiler bugs exist. Sometimes you don't have access to debug info and a debugger, just the instruction pointer and a register dump. Sometimes the compiler just can't optimise well enough.

C is just one level of abstraction higher, so that's probably the level that's going to leak through when your high-level-language interpreter fails for some bizarre reason. (recent Ruby segfaults anyone?)

It's not turtles all the way down, but rather a menagerie of different abstractions, and it's useful to know your zoology, as it were.

jimbokun3• 18 years ago

What's the answer to the p, q, r question?

parenthesis• 18 years ago

What p points to shouldn't be modified (but p can be changed to point to something else).

q mustn't be changed to point to something else (but what it points to can be changed -- except that in this particular example, q will point to a string constant, which shouldn't be modified).

Both of the above.

jimbokun3• 18 years ago

Thanks!

catechin• 18 years ago

Obviously you should be familiar with C. This entire conversation, however, is misguided by comparing it to Java or to fancy high-level languages. It's apples and oranges.

Of all of those, only C/C++ offers extremely high performance as its key feature. Being primarily a shorthand for assembly, C occupies a permanent place as the systems and performance language of choice and will remain there. If your application demands performance, use it. If not, then don't.

seano• 18 years ago

Sure, but first write the application in a higher level language and then, if required, you can re-write the bottleneck in C. Otherwise what you are doing amounts to premature optimisation.

rw2• 18 years ago

Otherwise what you are doing amounts to premature optimisation.

That's a good insight - what language you use is also a form of optimization.

hsmyers• 18 years ago

Just as a useful benchmark for all of you higher level language fans--- try programming without your C libraries...

Oompa2• 18 years ago

Completely agreed. I've been doing Euler problems in Ruby/Java, and my friend does them in C. The difference there is very noticeable, and quite interesting at the same time. Obviously our programs are only compared when we use the same algorithm.

Tichy• 18 years ago

What difference is noticeable? Speed? Code ugliness? Coding speed?

Enlightenment133• 18 years ago

The #1 thing that I hate about C++ is all the fcking side effects that people can bury in their constructors and every where else under the fcking sun. I want to start swinging a baseball bat at all the fcking idiots that don't think in advance of using the latest fcking cool C++ whatsamcallit.

When you are maintaining a very very large project, the best thing about C is that when you read the code it is fairly obvious what is going on, and you don't have worry about some innocent looking code causing a bunch of other crap the be executed behind your back.

On the downside of C, name space collisions are a problem and the ability to hide data and functions.

I vote they should add C++ style classes to fix the name space problem, and private and public keywords to hide data and functions. I don't want all of the object-oriented B.S. like constructors and destructors that makes it difficult to read and debug other peoples code.

Don't get me wrong.....I think some features of C++ are very useful, especially operator overloading which has allow us to make it easier to code big programs that handle lots of longer intergers and weird integer sizes like 56 bits, or 112 bits, or 128 bits. Yeah, these days we have uint64_t in C99 compilers, but back in the mid-90's we had to write code in C++ just because it had operator overloaded classes, which we also had to write.

Even though I haven't stated earlier...I do real-time embedded software...so I'm not going to be writing an interrupt in Perl or Python anytime soon. C is not going away in the real-time / embedded software / driver world anytime soon. It is still very very common!

Enlightenment133• 18 years ago

The #1 group that says C should be dieing off is f-ing book authors and sellers! Why? Because they can't write a bunch of new books on an older language. It is old...so we can't write book and make money on those older things. New stuff is cool...yeah new stuff is cool...buy our books...buy are books.

Enlightenment133• 18 years ago

>> C is a powerful tool, and every programmer should know it. But it's woefully underpowered as a fulltime software devlepment tool.

Only a inexperienced fool says such a thing! The bottom line is that it all depends on your what you are trying to do. For embedded / real-time / drivers / O/S, both C and C++ are perfect, but for middleware and scripting and many other high level things they aren't the best language.

eventhough• 18 years ago

What is the answer to the second question?

int i[10]; <- allocates memory for 10 integers

&i <- pointer to the first element in the array (i.e. i[0]).

correct or not?

gizmo2• 18 years ago

Geez. No.

int i[10]; does allocate memory for 10 integers (on the stack)

So i has the type int•. A pointer to a value: an array. A pointer to a value is the same thing as a pointer to the first value in the array. That's why you can use ++i, increment the pointer, and it will point to the second value in the array (++i => •i == i[1])

So &i is, wait for it, a int••, that is, a pointer to an array. So if you have an array of arrays, then you need to dereference twice. E.g. argv. It's a char••, so an array of strings which is an array of arrays of characters.

kylec• 18 years ago

If you declare

int i[10];

you can't do

++i

because modification of the value of i is not allowed.

Why I Still Like C

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