General > General Technical Chat
How many people code in C these days, and if so, why?
IDEngineer:
--- Quote from: floobydust on May 11, 2020, 08:00:09 pm ---I've always hated the language's lack of range-checking, where you index outside an array's bounds - this has countless bugs and punches to memory locations, enabled countless buffer-overrun virus invasions, to this day. I understand it's too much overhead to check during run-time like other languages, but it's a huge danger.
--- End quote ---
Think of C as a "more portable Assembly language" and it makes much more sense. That's how I came to C - nearly everything professional I'd done up to that point was in pure Assembly for whatever platform. But then I joined a team whose project was based in C. Originally I was tasked with writing the hyper-critical sections in Assembly for maximum performance, but you can't do that very long while remaining ignorant of the language to which you're interfacing.
So I taught myself C, and it was easy. And fast. And logical. Because I came at it from a "lower level language" (Assembly), I was already accustomed to a programming environment where you have limitless flexibility and the responsibility that goes with it. I didn't expect the language to bounds-check my pointers, that's MY job. I didn't expect the language to type-check my variables, that's MY responsibility and sometimes you want/need the flexibility to access things in weird ways. Ultimately, it's all just bytes in memory anyway and you should be able to access the 2nd byte of a DWORD directly in memory if you want/need to. Do I need to be careful? Of course, but that's what I'm being paid to do: Be a professional who pays attention to details.
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engrguy42:
Thanks. I'm curious in the major commercial software world the bosses are always running around saying "I WANT RE-USABLE LIBRARIES PEOPLE !!! I WANT OBJECTS AND CLASSES AND FUNCTIONS WE CAN RE-USE ON THE NEXT JOB!!"
Maybe special awards for the guy who produces the most re-usable classes/objects/functions each month. :D
Hell, if it was me I'd be all over that. Why write spaghetti code when you can make a nice clean re-usable module?
coppice:
--- Quote from: bd139 on May 11, 2020, 08:26:22 pm ---
--- Quote from: Sal Ammoniac on May 11, 2020, 08:22:23 pm ---The industry is littered with the burned-out wrecks of companies who thought rewriting their bread and butter products in a newer, shinier language was a good idea.
--- End quote ---
Hey, my house was paid for by the hopes and dreams of those companies :-DD
--- End quote ---
Projects off the rails are the most secure source of employment in the software industry.
IDEngineer:
That, and legacy COBOL code running government agencies....
SiliconWizard:
--- Quote from: coppice on May 11, 2020, 10:17:22 pm ---
--- Quote from: bd139 on May 11, 2020, 08:26:22 pm ---
--- Quote from: Sal Ammoniac on May 11, 2020, 08:22:23 pm ---The industry is littered with the burned-out wrecks of companies who thought rewriting their bread and butter products in a newer, shinier language was a good idea.
--- End quote ---
Hey, my house was paid for by the hopes and dreams of those companies :-DD
--- End quote ---
Projects off the rails are the most secure source of employment in the software industry.
--- End quote ---
Ahah, true. I even wonder how many jobs all failed software projects have created. Probably a lot. ;D
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