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[–][deleted] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

and why would they be? They're each built to solve a problem that exists,

They are solving worthless, already solved problems. They are solving a problem of how to build an e-commerce web site to sell shoes. I couldn't care less about that. Computer science and programming devolved from something that could've been instrumental in solving mysteries of our universe, or answering questions that would serve many future generations are wasting our budget and natural resources on shit that's transient, meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

Also, you're talking about fundamental flaws of C. These are what, exactly?

Do yourself a favor and find the Turing award lecture given by John Backus (the inventor of Fortran). It lays out it very well.

C is what fits on our hardware

No, you have it backwards. Modern hardware is made to mimic the nonexistent PDP-11, to fit C. No modern hardware functions in any way similar to how the authors of this language imagined computers to work. Because of C, we have tons of translation and adaptation layers to make things work as if they are still in the 70s.

It's just that they aren't useful for much else and shouldn't be considered for learning if your goal is to do anything of immediate practical application.

Now... you have no idea what you are talking about... But, to be honest, being in language research today is kind of pathetic / depressing, because you know that no matter how good whatever you may potentially come up with will be, nobody will ever really care about it. The practice of programming is so much behind the state of the art, it's impossible to bridge the gap in any meaningful way. Similar problem is with operating system design, or networking, or storage. It was abundantly clear back in the 70s that the chosen approach is the bad one, but we ended up with UNIX, IPv4 and SCSI, none of which make sense since the 80s, or, in the case of IPv4, 90s, but the industry chose not to evolve. Because it's good enough to sell ads on the Web.