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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: 2) by KiloByte on Friday November 10 2017, @09:04PM

    by KiloByte (375) on Friday November 10 2017, @09:04PM (#595348)

    Note that I explicitly excluded business logic, websites and so on. It depends on what type of program you're writing. Heck, most of my coding time is spent doing Perl! Use the right tool for the job.

    there are only two kinds of languages

    There are only two kinds of people: those that incorrectly oversimplify things into two categories, and those who realize that reality is a bit more complex than that.

    And those who quote out of context to ignore the third kind I mentioned. But yeah, include the obligatory joke about off-by-one errors. :)

    --
    Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
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