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How many people code in C these days, and if so, why?
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Nominal Animal:

--- Quote from: Karel on May 17, 2020, 03:01:50 pm ---
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on May 17, 2020, 02:28:31 pm ---At the next level, you have low-level programming languages.  Nowadays (among actively-used programming languages), this includes C, Forth, and Fortran at least.

--- End quote ---
When I did my C programming course, it was considered a high-level programming language...  8)

--- End quote ---
That's the reason for the 'Nowadays' in there.  ;)  Things change, we adapt.  We learn from the past, but live in today, and prepare for tomorrow.

It takes a variety of problems and approaches to solving them to see and understand the value of having many tools.

In some ways, I think of C the same way I think of PVA glue (wood glue, plain "white" or "yellow" glue, available in just about every store).
It is cheap and simple.  Because of that, some think it is "poor".  Yet, for the task of gluing long-grain wood to long-grain wood (one of the most common cases, and problematic with many other glues in the long term), it is just about the best thing there is.  Not only can you easily make the seams invisible (just clamp them tight, but not so tight you squeeze all the glue out of the seam), but the joint is stronger than the surrounding wood.  And it won't fail due to wood movement, like epoxies and cyanoacrylates might, because the joint is slightly flexible.  And while PVA glue is over a hundred years old invention, we do have improved on it with various slight changes and additives, that make "variants" for example waterproof after curing.

Similarly, I think C has its use cases, and cannot be realistically replaced with something completely different.  We could make it better, though; a lot of the hardware we use C on has features that really didn't exist four decades ago.  Whether that should be a change to the language itself, or a "sibling language" (similar to Python 2 versus Python 3 being mostly the same but slightly different), I do not know.  In all cases, it would need to be as simple and with as few abstractions as C has now, because that is its niche.
Wolfgang:
... just an academic question:

If you are allowed to use just *one* language in a large, real world problem ranging from GUI to math to drivers and control, data storage, multiplatform ...

what language would *you* choose ?
chriva:
C++...
bd139:

--- Quote from: Wolfgang on May 17, 2020, 04:08:43 pm ---... just an academic question:

If you are allowed to use just *one* language in a large, real world problem ranging from GUI to math to drivers and control, data storage, multiplatform ...

what language would *you* choose ?

--- End quote ---

Steel Bank Common Lisp

Edit: fucking iOS autocomplete got me
paulca:

--- Quote from: Wolfgang on May 17, 2020, 04:08:43 pm ---... just an academic question:

If you are allowed to use just *one* language in a large, real world problem ranging from GUI to math to drivers and control, data storage, multiplatform ...

what language would *you* choose ?

--- End quote ---

I'd leave.

But.  If it came to that, it would have to be C or C++.
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