30 years of C

http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=1132

by pragmatic • 17 years ago

101 55 17 years ago

fogus2• 17 years ago

" When I worked for Apple a few years later I was dismayed that it was a Pascal shop..."

I never knew this, interesting tidbit. Like many programmers I've read my share of Apple history books, but somehow Apple Pascal eluded me.

cesare5• 17 years ago

Yep. Much of the original Mac OS was written in Pascal.

I still have a boxed copy of Symantec Think Pascal. I used it to make my first steps in window based/event driven applications programming on the Mac (in 1990).

I remember coding my first apps invoking the system calls directly to create windows, handling events (see where the user clicked) etc. Then I moved to Codeworrior which had a nice c++ framework.

drewr• 17 years ago

If my high school CS teacher had told me that Mac OS had been written in Pascal, I would have been slightly more enthused about learning it. I had a similar, nebulous unease with it as dadhacker and really enjoyed C when I got to college.

billswift• 17 years ago

You might want to reread the part of the post on the importance of spelling. I am not familiar with program names - is that supposed to be Codeworrier or Codewarrior, or am I wrong and it's spelled correctly.

cesare5• 17 years ago

s/Codeworrior/Codewarrior/g

huhtenberg• 17 years ago

Ever wondered why almost all of Win32 API is __stdcall ? :)

awolf• 17 years ago

"Don’t leave unused code hanging around because it might be useful someday. If it’s not being used right now, remove it, because even just sitting there it’s costing you."

Couldn't agree more - every extra line makes the source code that much harder to wrap your brain around.

If I glance at a section in my code and can't instantly grasp what it is doing and how it fits into the bigger picture then I know I still have refactoring to do.

DarkShikari• 17 years ago

And version control keeps it around for you anyways.

I can't even count the number of times I've heard "but this code will be useful if/when we add support for feature X" used to justify hundreds or even thousands of lines of ifdeffed-out cruft.

sunkencity4• 17 years ago

I worked with someone who never threw old code away. It was amusingly difficult to try to understand what his code did. Typically shitloads of php files that didn't do anything and in the files that actually did something stuff like

   if (false) { ... large incomprehensible code block .. }

was common. Why comment out stuff when you can just disable it programmatically?

fogus2• 17 years ago

Yes, version control does keep it around for you, but often it is not the easiest thing to associate some piece of code with a repo version. I am not advocating keeping chunks of commented-out code around; just saying that I have yet to find an optimal solution to the other side of the problem either.

InclinedPlane• 17 years ago

On the next episode of Code Hoarders...

ivankirigin2• 17 years ago

I "know" C. But are there any good resources on learning to build real systems in C? I don't like C++.

wooby• 17 years ago

The best resource I've found was "The Unix Programming Environment," which goes beyond the C language and into using common libraries and organizing C projects with make and other tools.

Other than that, some food for thought on use of C in the real world is this article by Rob Pike, "Notes on Programming in C:"

http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/pikestyle.html

sunkencity4• 17 years ago

Look at successful open source projects and read the source.

silentbicycle3• 17 years ago

Some successful open source projects have dreadful source, though.

There are several threads on HN recommending source to read. (Off the top of my head, I'd recommend the source for Lua and OpenBSD's userland utilities.)

ivankirigin2• 17 years ago

Like what? Memcache is written in C, right? Python itself?

Anyone actually follow this method want to chime in?

sunkencity4• 17 years ago

>Some successful open source projects have dreadful source, though.

Still a good learning experience, but yeah, it would be preferable to choose something well known for quality code. I learnt a lot from programming an apache2 module. Supposedly the apache code isn't the best C project available, but there are some interesting real-world aspects of it.

jcw• 17 years ago

I'm trying to do this myself--I taught myself C, but still can't write any non-trivial programs. Some people find C easy to comprehend, and think naturally in terms of pointers. Not me.

Gnu Ed's source code is quite easy to read. Plan 9's utilities also have very clear, concise source code.

nkurz2• 17 years ago

I've found some books like Maguire's "Writing Solid Code" and McConnell's "Code Complete" to be helpful, but your best resources are probably the source code to systems similar to your definition of 'real'. Depending on this definition, I'd suggest looking at the source for SQLite (compact and rock solid), Apache (customizable request handling), Perl (for polymorphic data types), and Linux (a big modular system). Basically, pick any of the open source tools you use, and see how they've solved the problem you are interested in!

snorkel• 17 years ago

The single most glossed over topic in C textbooks how to avoid using fixed-sized buffers and arrays, and instead use dynamic allocation of string buffers, arrays, and dynamic list structures. Kenneth Reek's book "Pointers on C" is excellent for understanding this in vivid detail. You can not read that book and then claim to be confused by pointers ever again.

far33d• 17 years ago

I learned all I know of C from doing the projects for CS167/9 at Brown. The lectures, and more importantly, the project assignments, are online:

http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/cs167/lect.old.08.shtml http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/cs167/asgn.shtml

coliveira• 17 years ago

I like this part: "Template meta-programming is a great example of people being clever without being responsible."

cturner• 17 years ago

    can’t help but think that Sun continued to blow its
    opportunities here, for years.

Usually I jump on the bash-java bandwagon. However, I think the author's wrong about this. Java is good in a team setting, and Java is the best choice for the enterprise.

I support a cross-platform, plugin-oriented Java application with a large install base and wouldn't want it written in anything else.

In C applications, it happens that applications will have segfaults, and threaded log less helpfully on the way down whereas in java there's a command that allows you to analyse threads of a running process. When there's a Java problem I have much better odds of getting my head around the source than I would for the sort of macro-affected C source that you'd need for an application run in this setting. If it were to run out of memory it would be clear about it. When you're stuck with libraries where the source and developers are long gone it's realistic to use a decompiler. With some preparation at dev time you can use the classpath and classloaders to hot-patch.

C is good for programmers, but not so good for the other technical workers. And I don't think C is as much of a big deal as it used to be due to the advances in scripting languages. I do a fair bit of programming oriented around unix system calls, all in python. Sometimes I find the documentation is better in C, and mock it up there, and then carry it back to python where I can do more with it. Also, if you're on Bigco's standard-issue Solaris host you're far more likely to find perl than a C compiler. Computers are faster than they used to be. Raw execution speed and memory footprint of a process (areas where C is stronger) are much less relevant to scale issues than they used to be.

Reply said:

    The author is comparing Java to C#, not C.

Er - ah - so he did. Thanks for being polite about it.

arohner• 17 years ago

The author is comparing Java to C#, not C.

kabdib• 17 years ago

If it matters, I happen to agree with you, as what you said holds true for Java-vs-C as well as for C#-vs-C.

For Java-vs-C#, I hold my ground :-)

I tend to hack up Perl-like tools in C# these days, using a small regexp-centric framework that also handles command line parsing. It's not much more code, and I feel better about it in my current community.

30 years of C

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