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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I would have said the same thing a few years ago, but after writing C++ professionally for a while I have to grudgingly admit that most of the new features are very useful for writing simpler code.

    A few are still infuriating though, and I still consider the language an abomination. It has too many awful legacy problems that can never be fixed.


  • The only conceivable way to avoid pointers in C is by using indices into arrays, which have the exact same set of problems that pointers do because array indexing and pointer dereferencing are the same thing. If anything array indexing is slightly worse, because the index doesn’t carry a type.

    Also you’re ignoring a whole host of other problems in C. Most notably unions.

    People say that “you only need to learn pointers”, but that’s not a real thing you can do. It’s like saying it’s easy to write correct brainfuck because the language spec is so small. The exact opposite is true.


  • I’m not a fan of C++, but move semantics seem very clearly like a solution to a problem that C invented.

    Though to be honest I could live with manual memory management. What I really don’t understand is how anyone can bear to use C after rewriting the same monomorphic collection type for the 20th time.



  • The specifics of C’s design could barely be less important. In the 70s it was one of countless ALGOL derivatives churned out on-demand to support R&D projects like Unix.

    Unix succeeded, but it could have been written in any of these languages. The C design process was governed by the difficulty of compiler implementation; everyone was copying ALGOL 68 but some of the features took too long to implement. If Dennis Ritchie had an extra free weekend in 1972, C might have a module system. But he didn’t, so it doesn’t.