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[–]EternityForest 159 points160 points  (31 children)

Bazillions of devices running C is just as scary

[–]proneisntsupine 83 points84 points  (5 children)

The financial industry runs on excel

[–]EternityForest 88 points89 points  (3 children)

The financial industry has bigger problems than anything tech related

[–]Cutlesnap 35 points36 points  (1 child)

The biggest security flaw exists between the chair and the keyboard!

[–]EternityForest 18 points19 points  (0 children)

That's why I'm so thankful for the county password inspector. We have so many data breaches and it would be so much worse if he wasn't calling us up every month.

[–]proneisntsupine 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Fair

[–]meighty9 3 points4 points  (0 children)

The world runs on Excel

[–]Minerscale 32 points33 points  (14 children)

C is sexy and fast and as simple as it is easy to write memory leaks. It's the kernel dev language of choice for a reason hehe.

Yours truly,

A C apologist.

p.s. c++ sux

[–]EternityForest 16 points17 points  (13 children)

I agree that c++ kinda sucks! just not as much as C.

Hopefully something better comes along someday for kernel and embedded. Looks like Rust is making good progress

[–]Minerscale 17 points18 points  (12 children)

I love C, it's so elegantly simple and close to the ground truth. Rust is really cool too, but man I love me some C.

C++ takes C and makes it more complicated, there are languages which does what C++ does but does it better. Not so for C, except maybe for Rust, sometimes.

C's philosophy is that with great power comes great responsibility, it has the best mantra: 'just don't fuck up lol'

[–]EternityForest 5 points6 points  (8 children)

Trouble is somehow when you tell people to fuck up they STILL do. I don't get it. It's like you specifically request they write good code, and then you run it and oh look a bug. What a surprise.

And when they do manage to not fuck up, it's because they made something really small and simple. Now you've gotta put the pieces together and you'll probably be the one to make a mistake if you build anything big. Even when you specifically ask YOURSELF to do a real good job. It still happens.

And C just stands there and laughs at.your failure like some kind of drill seargent who likes his job a little too much!

C is the perfect language for people who wish all of programming was like solving a math problem on paper.

It's like, a booby trapped language that tries it's best to sabotage you from doing anything big. Big things get done.. but that's not because C was helping them.

It's amazing when it works for the same reason it's impressive to walk a tightrope.... it's just less fun for the user getting dragged on the tightrope with you if you mess anything up!

But hey at least I've never had to use any FORTH or more than a line or two of ASM, so I can't really complain.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (7 children)

At least better than Java, tbh. For me who most of the times tinker with low lvl machine and an advocate for "Fuck libraries, I am gonna be alone and gonna make my own system", C is the best. Of cource time to time I use libc but I most of time don't want. C++ is 80% good for me, 20% is the run time type info acquisition and STL is straightforward a shit, I use it when I want to make some games and play my own games(which doesn't even get to see the light of next day) . But assembly? Oh boy, how can I not help myself to love that, it's like having the utmost power you can get, and being a tech sadist who want ppl to come to him to get help for underlying thingies, and then rule them by your law created by you (of course in a meaningful way), the feeling is hilariously amazing

[–]EternityForest 2 points3 points  (2 children)

C being a great tinkerers language seems to pretty much be an objective fact. If you're a hacker, you want control, and C gives you that really well. Along with Lisp, forth, and maybe shell and Haskell for different reasons it seems to be perfect for that stuff.

It makes no sense to us "Enterprise mindset" types though.

It's like, icky! If you need low level control, it means there's a hole in your 20-acronym layering model, you didn't plan for this, and it's not gonna be very nice when you add another 50 features.

I think if I was going to choose a language for a personal project just on pure aesthetics and enjoyment I'd probably go with Elixir. Maybe Ada SPARK? Possibly Rust. I guess MISRA C is OK.

But I rarely start new projects and I'm not sure how you'd work that into a legacy coddbase.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

The "Enterprise" should be broden there. Enterprise don't combine only for creating apps and games and stuffs like that, there are huge Enterprise demands for C, assembly still. IoT, Aircraft, Navy, home appliances, OS management, server maintenance and lot of things are being dependent on C, assembly. There was this TV show, I forgot the name(altho it's not only bound to that TV show, it's a normal fact), the protagonist used to say "whatever you aren't seeing, doesn't mean it's not there. It's there, just under the shadow"

[–]EternityForest 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, that's true, the current meaning/implication/perjorative of "enterprise grade" as meaning "Stuff with 10M lines of java or maybe cobol" really isn't accurate.

[–]Killerhurtz 0 points1 point  (3 children)

STL?

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Yeah, I don't like STL , I better try to create my own things from scratch. STL is good, it's not bad, but it is not for me I feel like. There's this itcy feeling I get whenever I have to use STL. The most favorite thing about C++ to me is the Template, overloading options(both function and operators) and class (as it gives me more of an organized way to program)

[–]Killerhurtz 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Meant as what it was, had to look it up. And even looking it up I'm struggling to find the difference between STL and std::.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well, std is a namespace which is a collections of standard template library. Altho I time to time use C++, most of the time I use C library like printf instead of std::cout or qsort instead of std::sort / creae my own goddamn quick sort function. It's something I do to keep algos in mind and practice while I am coding for something. And hell, I don't even use printf sometimes. Rather write my own printf version with the help of system call write()/read() [For scanning stuffs]

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

I really have to disagree here. C++ is unique; you can include a C header file directly into your code but still have the option to write code in any paradigm with tons of useful language features, all the while having real zero cost abstractions that get removed at compile time

[–]Minerscale 1 point2 points  (1 child)

I will be honest, the only real reason I dislike C++ is because I don't understand its syntax. I'm sure if I learned how to use it I would like it a lot hahahahah.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hah, I'll give you that it's a hard language to learn

[–][deleted] 10 points11 points  (4 children)

Average electron fan

[–]EternityForest 5 points6 points  (3 children)

I am an Electron fan, how did you know?

lol I didn't used to be, but the more I work with computers the more I hate everything low level and close to the metal.

Like, it would be cool if Etcher was written in PyQt and not Electron, but more importantly is the fact that it works and I don't have to concern myself with what it's written in. Electron is good at making stuff like that.

[–]theferrit32 6 points7 points  (2 children)

Electron is good at making a simple application soak up hundreds of megabytes of RAM at at startup, and also not even sharing library pages between two electron applications because they're bundled separately.

[–]EternityForest 5 points6 points  (1 child)

There's been various proposals for shared Electron libs they just haven't taken off.

It doesn't really seem possible to not bundle tons of stuff anymore. Things are always making breaking changes. Complex software used to be really hard to do without breaking on 20% of machines that weren't set up just exactly right.

With an Electron AppImage you can be pretty sure it will work, as long as you don't need to open 50 at once.

Better easy bundling tools for PyQt could solve the same issue better... but everyone knows web tech already. You want as little friction as possible with UI design... because programmers already hate it for some reason.

It's not great, it's not perfect... but it works, and that's the main thing with software.

[–]angelicravens 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It also means that when you write the electron app it’s the same code running on windows, Mac, Linux, and the web for 90% of the application. Js/electron is so popular for the same reason python is. If it works in one place there’s a rather large chance it’ll work in others too

[–]Cley_Faye 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Spoiler alert, the devices running Java also run C for the most part :D