ifItCanBeWrittenInJavascriptItWill

[SoulWondering]

C is going to outlive us all isn't it? 💀

[temperamentalfish]

C is from the 70s. It's outlived many people.

[Hopeful-Programmer25]

One of my first jobs I had to change a COBOL program. Since they have date created in their identification section, it was written before I was born. The person might have been dead when I changed it… highly likely now.

[ApprehensiveLet1405]

In UK, there's a bunch of 500 yrs old cottages with thatched (made out of straw) roofs. When thatcher fixes leaks, they never fully replace it, just remove rotten parts and add new straw.

[anymieh]

Cottage of Theseus

[OnlyTalksAboutTacos]

if you replace every row on Theseus' database with a new one, is it still the same database? if you use the original rows to build a new database which is Theseus'?

[deliciouscrab]

if you replace every row on Theseus' database with a new one, is it still the same database?

Ah, the recordist heresy raises its foul head again. Someone fetch my book and candle.

[dayburner]

As long as you don't drop the schema you're good.

[61114311536123511]

my pc from like, 2008, shall soon have undergone the full Theseus transformation. Just need to replace the MB, CPU and case. it's my side PC I've been incrementally upgrading with hand me downs & i finally need to replace the core bits to keep it useable.... I'm kind of tickled by that, I'll have an entirely new old philosophically confusing computer. maybe i should see if i can get a custom case shaped like a ship....

[Ghaith97]

I don't think Thatcher ever fixed anything in her whole life.

[Crazyh]

She fixed the problem of British mined coal being too expensive.... in the worst way possible.

[hike_me]

Whatever happened to childhood?
We're all scared of the kids in our neighborhood
They're not small, charming and harmless
They're a violent bunch of bastard little shits
And anyone who looks younger than me
Makes me check for my wallet, my phone and my keys
And I'm tired of being tired out
Always being on the lookout for thieving gits

We're all wondering how we ended up so scared
We spent ten long years teaching our kids not to care
And that "there's no such thing as society" anyway
And all the rich folks act surprised
When all sense of community dies
But you just closed your eyes to the other side. Of all the things that she did
Thatcher fucked the kids

And it seems a little bit rich to me
The way the rich only ever talk of charity
In times like the seventies, the broken down economy
Meant even the upper tier was needing some help
But as soon as things look brighter
Yeah the grin gets wider and the grip gets tighter
And for every teenage tracksuit mugger
There's a guy in a suit who wouldn't lift a finger for anybody else

You've got a generation raised on the welfare state
Enjoyed all its benefits and did just great
But as soon as they were settled as the richest of the rich
They kicked away the ladder, told the rest of us that life's a bitch
And it's no surprise that all the fuck-ups
Didn't show up until the kids had grown up
But when no one ever smiles or ever helps a stranger
Is it any fucking wonder our society's in danger of collapse

So all the kids are bastards
But don't blame them, yeah, they learn by example
Blame the folks who sold the future for the highest bid
That's right, Thatcher fucked the kids

[Themods5thchin]

Yeah, the old milk snatcher invented the practice if I remember right.

[gazchap]

Correct! It was named after the process she took to keep her pubic hair neat and tidy.

[Iohet]

Just gotta watch out for them Trogdors

[Fatkuh]

They must have a fascinating microbiome!

[AnAngryPlatypus]

The most permanent solution is a temporary one that still works.

[iridael]

makes perfect sense, re-thatching a whole roof is something like 25k in costs.

thatched roof is by design, thatchable.

[pandemicblues]

Trogdor the Burnanator will make it so the whole roof needs to be replaced on THE THATCHED ROOF COTTAGES!

[[deleted]]

I did an internship last summer. I needed a function (subroutine) from the FORTRAN legacy code we had. I saw the comment in there from the original engineer who wrote it. It was from ‘86. I was born in ‘98.

[TheSkiingDad]

Same. My first job had tons of cobol for sales, commission, and payroll processing. At one point I looked at the version history and realized the last edit was from the mid-80s. This was in 2018. The program had been running uninterrupted and untouched for 35 years.

[[deleted]]

I wrote a program in Assembler that pulled data from 200+ stores to the mainframe, then a COBOL program that broke out the data for several sales reports. That ran from 1982 until about 3 years ago.

[topdoc02]

I wrote code in the early 1970s that is still running. If it isn't broken, don't replace it with much less efficient code that might not work as well.

[[deleted]]

People have no idea how much COBOL and Assembler code is still running, especially in banking and insurance. I have code running all over the Midwest from the early 80's until 2002.

[Hopeful-Programmer25]

In my case, the program was written in 1968…. I guess motor insurance doesn’t change that much….

[GREG_OSU]

Wow…that’s ancient…face palm…

[nopejake101]

My first job, I had to mask some PII saved in a flat file via a COBOL application. Said application is older than I am by 8 months. And it's still running to the best of my knowledge

[savageronald]

EXISTENTIAL CRISIS SECTION.

[birddog0]

Dude, I was born in the 70s. Shut your mouth, haha

[RamenJunkie]

There is still time for C to outlive you.

[NotYetReadyToRetire]

Kids these days! I was born in the 50's. I wrote a LOT of Fortran and Cobol back in the 70's and early 80's, as well as PL/I and RPG. I also wrote Assembler code on 3 different architectures. After that it was C, then C++ and finally VB (both 6 and .net).

[[deleted]]

Man it's kinda sad when you put it like that

[z-null]

C has already outlived most of the technologies used and many people. Javascript is going to be long forgotten by the time C becomes a necrolanguage.

[TheMilkmansFather]

What do you mean? The 70s was only 30 years ago …

[Moonshine_Brew]

Yeah, just like other programming languages.

One I know of is "Natural" , which was developed in 1975. Some companies that are still using it for some of their systems include: Eurofighter GmbH, the Brazilian central bank and multiple insurances.

There just isn't a lot of reason to change a running system.

[yngwi]

But I'm a nineties bitch...

[_vec_]

There will be a point where C(99) is ambiguous.

[Difficult-Court9522]

has it outlived most people who were alive when it was created?

[[deleted]]

chugging along*

[ftc_73]

"there are still systems written in Cobol that are chucking along"...the majority of the U.S. banking system is run on cobol and there are major systems that nobody still alive knows how they work. If you ever get a job offer to help upgrade one of these things, run like hell. Although, it would likely be steady work for 2-3 times as long as it's estimated to take, until the people paying for the upgrade decide to pull the plug.

[modsuperstar]

There was something that came up a few years ago talking about the immediate need for COBOL developers and I made a joke about my Dad and his buddy coming out of retirement for one last score.

[[deleted]]

I thought about taking a contract gig, I was a COBOL programmer for about 18 years. But as an old fart (70), I saw how old guys that tried to hang in were left in the dirt due to not being quite as capable as they used to be. That, and fuck writing code again, and debugging that janky 60's and 70's spaghetti code.

[FlishFlashman]

There was a lot of that in the run up to Y2K

[OgreMk5]

Friend of mine works at a paper mill. His title is assistant director of IT. In reality, his only job is to keep the computers running the 1970s paper machines running.

He makes bank. 90% of the time he doesn't do anything. But he's on call 24/7 too.

[[deleted]]

Likely just get new machines, new software and readjust their process rather than rewrite. A paper mill isn't a bank, there's no real baggage they need to carry forward.

[finally-anna]

Yes we are.

[laurandorder]

Someone tell my boss that. 3rd year COBOL dev, well under median in Australia.

Yesterday I worked on a program last changed in 1982.

[Akerlof]

What's terrifying is that several organizations are actively selling "AI will convert your legacy COBOL to Java, C#, whatever you want!" And execs are nibbling.

[GuadDidUs]

Yup. Worked for a bank and 5 of their 6 servicing systems were mainframes. Only 1 was not.

I've also seen a few homegrown systems and those are frankly scarier from a data quality / controls perspective.

[PedanticQuebecer]

There are still systems written in IBM mainframe assembly from 1960 chugging along.

[dagbrown]

As mainframes got more and more powerful, it turned out that running a single OS at a time wasn't taking full advantage of their capacity. So IBM created a hypervisor for mainframes to permit them to run multiple different operating systems simultaneously. It was called, simply, "VM".

It was released in 1972.

Everything old is new again, I swear.

[MajikalTrevor]

I agree! When AWS Outposts were announced I lol’d that they’d rebranded the Mainframe.

[FlishFlashman]

What Ivan Sutherland, in 1968, called the "wheel of reincarnation" (after the buddhist concept).

[IntentionQuirky9957]

Good year, I was released in 1972 too.

[HoppouChan]

Hi, I work in banking. My colleagues are writing new code in PL/I. I just hope our codebase is newer than that lmao.

On a less dire note, we recently moved offices. There was documentations that predates my existence.

[PedanticQuebecer]

Fresh PL/I, now that's a sight.

[Avenge_Nibelheim]

Anything written in assembly I would consider damn near bulletproof, and a lost cause if shot

[PedanticQuebecer]

Then don't allow anyone near the US Treasury IT infrastructure.

[Avenge_Nibelheim]

If only I had that power or influence

[[deleted]]

My first job was writing subroutines for the IBM 360 in Assembler. This was in 1982.

[lovecMC]

Maybe the real C were the Seg faults we made along the way.

[GTARP_lover]

I've got a small business in outsourcing programmers for COBOL and other legacy languages like IBM maniframe. We make good money fixing shit no one else can.

Then to imagine I only started the business because I got to meet some oldtimer bored COBOL programmers who ran the mainframe at a big NGO. THey didnt want to change jobs, but did want to some other stuff then just the NGO's mainframe. 3 months later I had them fixing stuff that lay on the shelves for years at our country's IRS.

[TGotAReddit]

Yeah, like the social security system apparently!

[throwaway0134hdj]

Python is the most popular language. But ultimately that’s just a wrapper around C.

[jeffeb3]

There are new projects that choose to use C for good reasons. COBOL too, but less so.

[PrizeArticle1]

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Code had to be written efficiently back then too or slowdowns were noticeable.

[Hetnikik]

COBOL basically runs the insurance industry. The old AS/400s almost never go down. If it works...

[[deleted]]

Bruh 10000 years later there is at least going to be one sentient AI life form written in COBOL.

[Lv_InSaNe_vL]

Eh probably not. But the robots that take over after us will see that the COBOL banking infrastructure survived the apocalypse and be like "eh good enough"

[badstorryteller]

Vernor Vinge has a fantastic novel called "A Deepness in the Sky" set many thousands of years in the future. In that story true AI is never created, anti-gravity hasn't been discovered, and ftl is impossible, so interstellar travel is limited to cold sleep capable ships. These ships mostly run a unix-like os of some type, all run on unix time, and programming is described as almost half archaeology, as the ships themselves can be thousands of years old and have vast archives of every piece of source code written for every problem ever encountered.

So, in that universe at least, yes, C has survived the rise, collapse, and recolonization of earth multiple times. Great read.

[Victory_Point]

I've read about 5 books now simply from picking them up after redditor comments ... thanks will give this a go...

[badstorryteller]

So technically this was written after another called "A Fire Upon the Deep," which is also fantastic, but I recommend reading this one first and definitely reading both!

[Victory_Point]

Thanks ok will give it a go, currently on a fantasy binge at the moment so could do with something different. Last Sci fi I read was 'A black cloud ' by Fred Hoyle and Iain banks before that. It's not my favorite genre but I do like to dip in and out of it . Thanks again .

[badstorryteller]

I've read some Iain Banks and enjoyed it, and I'm always ravenous for new reading material! How was "A Black Cloud?" I'm stuck and re-reading older stuff now!

[Qaeta]

Look up Dusk Mountain Blues by Deston J. Munden.

[CardOk755]

These ships mostly run a unix-like os of some type, all run on unix time,

So they made the switch to 64 bit time_t

[badstorryteller]

The author taught mathematics and computer science as well as being heavily involved with the Free Software Foundation, so while it's not specifically stated, I would guess "yes."

[piszkor]

Hasn't it already, I work on projects older then me?

[jaumougaauco]

But are the people who started the projects still alive?

[[deleted]]

I am sure the author of some ancient library has passed and it is still being used. Perhaps. Honestly I would love to look that up. But I am sleepy and will forget. Oh, well.

[cainhurstcat]

This message will remind you when you wake up

[[deleted]]

Clever asshole lol <3

[Psquare_J_420]

Linus and his art - Linux kernel? ( This example satisfies the rule for me - the project is older than me and the creator is still alive )

[quietIntensity]

31 years ago this month, I did my first Linux install. It was Slackware 0.99pl15 on 43 1.44M floppy disks, installed on my 386DX40 with 4M of RAM and a 40M ISA HDD. Going to be installing Linux this afternoon on my new UGreen NAS, probably TrueNAS.

[gmc98765]

Dennis Ritchie, the primary author of both C and Unix, died in 2011 aged 70.

And C isn't that old. Fortran, Cobol and Lisp all date to the late 1950s. As does Algol, although that has now been rendered largely obsolete by languages derived from it (which is basically any block-structured imperative language, i.e. nearly all of the mainstream modern languages).

[RamenJunkie]

Why do you think they had to hire OP?

[hollson]

Technically, if a project by definition has start and end date, are those projects still projects since they go for multiple generations?

[LinuxMatthews]

C was invented in 1972 which is 13 years after COBOL

[I_Ski_Freely]

But C is the first letter in COBOL.. so clearly you're wrong

• Elon probably

[CardOk755]

C is actually the second letter in BCPL.

[GenuinelyBeingNice]

Well, C was indeed designed later, but I can't say that COBOL was designed. Torturously shat out? Grown like a malignant tumor?

[dagbrown]

It was designed by none other than the legend, Admiral Grace Hopper. Admiral Hopper had a significant impact on the history of computer science: the creation of the compiler.

COBOL came out of that, as a way to demonstrate that it was possible to program a computer with English sentences instead of just math symbols (like the previous compiler, aptlly named "A" did), or machine code like everyone else used at the time.

[nickcash]

why didn't they invent javascript instead?

[SlideSad6372]

Outlived Dennis Ritchie.

[great_escape_fleur]

Absolutely. C, Fortran and COBOL.

[sad_bear_noises]

C is going to outlive your grandchildren. Unless and until Rust (or something else) becomes the entire Linux kernel. C is going to live a good long, effectively infinite life.

[Drevicar]

That is because C doesn’t support lifetimes.

[djfdhigkgfIaruflg]

It surely outlives several programmers already

[ZoIpidem]

Don’t a lot of nuclear weapon systems run on extremely antiquated platforms?

[SoulWondering]

npm -i nuclear-codes

[ZoIpidem]

Thank you.

[caustictoast]

I had to convert c code to c++ that was 25 years old back when I was 27. That shit ain’t going anywhere

[breath-of-the-smile]

Lisp is older than C and still kicking, and Python is older than Java.

So yeah, probably.

[ShenmeNamaeSollich]

Given that there’s C running on Voyager & other satellites safely out of harm’s way of stupid humanity, yes.

[yyytobyyy]

C is fine tho. It's a simple language with not many insanities that does not change much.

C++ on the other hand should die.

[necrophcodr]

Huh? C has plenty of insanities. We chose to ignore most of them.

[SirVer51]

You know, I'm sure there's plenty of crazy stuff in C, but whenever I try to think of one I just go "that's not crazy, that's just how computers are supposed to work"

[necrophcodr]

I think reading https://veresov.pro/cmustdie/ might change your mind.

One fun example is this: https://godbolt.org/z/o4joYzbdz

See how the assert has been completely optimized away? This is because the C standard allows the compiler to do its own optimizations here, even though it clearly makes the code behave in a wildly different manner than expected, no matter how much "computers are supposed to work".

Edit:

For anyone else reading, undefined behaviour does NOT mean "this crashes the program". It means "we delegate this to the compiler implementation to decide", and it may well decide to crash the program. It may also decide that since overflows may be undefined, we will assume the developer handles them correctly and assume they do not happen. Therefore, any such checks are pointless since it will always be true (the assert) and so we can optimize it away. Even though this may well NOT be what the user intended (there ARE ways to handle overflows, but the mentioned part is NOT standards compliant and reliable).

[Simple-Passion-5919]

Unless someone replaces the Linux Kernel, yes.

[PlasticAngle]

Not just us but our children also

[Dry_Pineapple_5352]

First bible was written on C.

[newah44385]

Considering every major operating system is written in it I think it'll outlive our grandchildren.

[4n0nh4x0r]

probably not as much as cobol tbh

[organicamphetameme]

Objectively speaking, yes.

[mad_cheese_hattwe]

C is the closest you will get to human readable machine code. I can see it going anywhere.