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posted by Fnord666 on Friday November 10 2017, @06:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the C,-C-Rust,-C-Rust-Go,-Go-Rust-Go! dept.

In which ESR pontificates on the future while reflecting on the past.

I was thinking a couple of days ago about the new wave of systems languages now challenging C for its place at the top of the systems-programming heap – Go and Rust, in particular. I reached a startling realization – I have 35 years of experience in C. I write C code pretty much every week, but I can no longer remember when I last started a new project in C!
...
I started to program just a few years before the explosive spread of C swamped assembler and pretty much every other compiled language out of mainstream existence. I'd put that transition between about 1982 and 1985. Before that, there were multiple compiled languages vying for a working programmer's attention, with no clear leader among them; after, most of the minor ones were simply wiped out. The majors (FORTRAN, Pascal, COBOL) were either confined to legacy code, retreated to single-platform fortresses, or simply ran on inertia under increasing pressure from C around the edges of their domains.

Then it stayed that way for nearly thirty years. Yes, there was motion in applications programming; Java, Perl, Python, and various less successful contenders. Early on these affected what I did very little, in large part because their runtime overhead was too high for practicality on the hardware of the time. Then, of course, there was the lock-in effect of C's success; to link to any of the vast mass of pre-existing C you had to write new code in C (several scripting languages tried to break that barrier, but only Python would have significant success at it).

One to RTFA rather than summarize. Don't worry, this isn't just ESR writing about how great ESR is.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Friday November 10 2017, @06:32PM (2 children)

    by bob_super (1357) on Friday November 10 2017, @06:32PM (#595260)

    Oh wait, it's: "if it's weird in ways that everyone understands and is used to live with", then why fragment to try to fix it ?

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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday November 10 2017, @07:31PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday November 10 2017, @07:31PM (#595291)

    From "Surely you must be joking, Dr. Feynman [northwestern.edu]":

    I thought my symbols were just as good, if not better, than the regular symbols--it doesn't make
    any difference what symbols you use--but I discovered later that it does make a difference. Once
    when I was explaining something to another kid in high school, without thinking I started to make
    these symbols, and he said, "What the hell are those?" I realized then that if I'm going to talk to
    anybody else, I'll have to use the standard symbols, so I eventually gave up my own symbols.

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]
  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday November 10 2017, @08:05PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday November 10 2017, @08:05PM (#595308) Journal

    then why fragment to try to fix it ?

    The real cost to language fragmentation is code migration and learning the quirks of the language. Both are one-time costs and the former can be heavily automated.