Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
You (group A) think C is simple, that it can be thought of as portable assembly, that it teaches you how computers actually work, and that itās easy to avoid memory safety errors with good programming discipline, and is therefore fine.
You (group B) think C is deceptively complex, is far removed from current-day real world hardware semantics, abstracts memory in an outdated and overly simplified manner, and that itās very hard for even professionals to write programs that are correct to the extent of equivalent programs in memory safe languages, therefore C shouldnāt be use for new software development.
I think C is deceptively complex, is far removed from current-day real world hardware semantics, abstracts memory in an outdated and overly simplified manner, and that itās very hard for even professionals to write programs that are correct to the extent of equivalent programs in memory safe languages, which are some of the features that make C so fun and exciting. Like rawdogging a one night stand!
We are not the same.
Yeah thatās the property of C that ensures it will never go away. If you keep telling young men (which most programmers starting out are) that this language is so dangerous, so scary, of course theyāll start using it. Thereās all sorts of rationalizations going on - itās portable, itās performant, itās what the computer is really like - to justify basically driving a fast car without a seatbelt for the sheer thrill of it.
Now to be fair, C really is quite close to what the machine is really like, if by C you mean B and by machine you mean PDP-7.
Itās also highly portable in the sense that all twenty or thirty well-formed, standard-compliant and nontrivial C programs ever written can be compiled to a mind-bogglingly huge variety of hardware and OS targets and even work correctly on some of them.
Past a certain point itās a little bit like learning to type on a typewriter. On one hand it forces you to think about certain types of mistakes and forces you to avoid making errors. On the other hand it gives you a whole bunch of trained habits that are either useless or actively harmful once youāre working with better tools.
I always suspected that I wasnāt a REAL MANā¢, but I didnāt know that me learning programming through C++ and being like āwell this shit sucks, what the fuck, there has to be a better wayā was one of the first symptoms.