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Why C Isn't a Programming

Language Any More
(theregister.com)

! Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday April 03, 2022 @02:55PM from the C-no-evil dept.
The C programming language has many problems. But
now the Registers notes that "Aria Beingessner, a member
of the teams that implemented both Rust and Swift, has an
interesting take... That C isn't a programming language
anymore...."

"And it hasn't been for a long time," Beingessner writes in

an online essay: This isn't about the fact that C is actually
horribly ill-defined due to a billion implementations or its
completely failed integer hierarchy. That stuff sucks, but
on its own that wouldn't be my problem.

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Why C Isn't a Programming Language Any More - Slashdot 20/04/2022, 14(24

My problem is that C was elevated to a role of prestige

and power, its reign so absolute and eternal that it has
completely distorted the way we speak to each other. Rust
and Swift cannot simply speak their native and
comfortable tongues — they must instead wrap themselves
in a grotesque simulacra of C's skin and make their flesh
undulate in the same ways it does.... MARIA ENROLS ON AN
Everyone had to learn to speak C to talk to the major
ENGINEERING DEGREE
operating systems, and then when it came time to talk to
eachother we suddenly all already spoke C so... why not
talk to eachother in terms of C too?

Oops! Now C is the lingua franca of programming.

Oops! Now C isn't just a programming language, it's a

protocol.
The Register picks up the argument: it's fair (if wildly
controversial) to say, as this 2018 Association for
Computing Machinery paper puts it, that C is not a low-
level programming language. As its subtitle says: "Your
computer is not a fast PDP-11."

This is not a relative assessment: that is, it's not saying

that there are other programming languages that are
lower-level than C. It's an absolute one: C is often praised
for being "close to the metal," for being a "portable
assembly language." It was, once, but it hasn't been since
the 1970s; the underlying computational models of
modern computers are nothing like the one that C
represents, which was designed for a 1970s 16-bit
minicomputer.
The Register summarizes what happens when a language
has to interface with an operating system — and thus, that
operating system's C code. [I]t has to call C APIs. This is From The Web Sponsored Links

done via Foreign Function Interfaces (FFIs).... In other Play Now In Your Browser
words, even if you never write any code in C, you have to
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handle C variables, match C data structures and layouts,
link to C functions by name with their symbols....

The real problem is that C was never designed or intended Remember Her? Take a Deep Breath Before
to be an Interface Definition Language, and it isn't very Seeing How She Looks Like Now
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Why C Isn't a Programming Language Any More - Slashdot 20/04/2022, 14(24

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I call BS (Score:5, Insightful)
by Gabest ( 852807 ) on Sunday April 03, 2022
@02:59PM (#62413586)
Nickname:
Every time I write speed critial code in C I check the
Password:asm output and it is totally possible to fine
generated
tune it to get
Public you want in low level.
Terminal
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
by rlwinm ( 6158720 )
^^^ This is a sign of a seasoned pro. Where it matters
(which is often less than 1% of the code) I know all the
seasoned guys check the output of the compiler both
for sanity and correctness as well as to guide the
compiler better.

Re: (Score:3)
by narcc ( 412956 )
You know, for years the common "wisdom" on
Slashdot has been that compilers are magic and that
mere humans can't possibly best them. They tell you
not to worry about how wretchedly inefficient your
code is because the compiler will magically optimize it.
They'll also tell you that processing power and memory
are so cheap that it's not worth your time to even
attempt to write more efficient code. Then they use
python, as if to prove their point that performance
doesn't matter any more, and then they wonder

Re: That's what I call BS (Score:3)

by shm ( 235766 )
Profilers are your friend.

Re: That's what I call BS (Score:3)

by shm ( 235766 )
Back in the day I worked on a telecom subsystem

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which used a 68020. Commercial kernel, fit in 4k. I

think that was the same size as the onchip cache.
Almost 30 years ago and now I can not even remember
the OS name.

Re:That's what I call BS (Score:5, Insightful)

by Aighearach ( 97333 ) on Sunday April 03, 2022
@03:39PM (#62413676)
Their claim is so ridiculously stupid it really calls into
question the future of Rust if these are the sort of idiots
on their core team.
Most of my code runs on embedded systems. Most of
the documentation I keep open while writing C is
processor registers. I have absolutely no trouble at all
doing this in C. Because, golly, it is "close to the
metal."
Aria Beingessner should burn her IDE and learn how
the stuff works.
Rust and Swift cannot simply speak their native and
comfortable tongues — they must instead wrap
themselves in a grotesque simulacra of C's skin
Not C's fault.
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Re: (Score:3)
by Darinbob ( 1142669 )
Absolutely stupid, I agree. Doesn't sound like a
programmer wrote this to be honest, more like a
journalist who saw a few books. Of course it's a
language, not a protocol. And no, it's integer hierarchy
isn't broken. And it has standards, it's not a mass of
incompatible compilers. Yes, it interfaces to an OS, but
it is also used for applications.

Re:That's what I call BS (Score:5, Insightful)

by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Sunday April 03, 2022
@04:45PM (#62413858)
Yes, it interfaces to an OS
Yes, and it does so through assembly language stubs.
Rust does the same and has no problem interfacing
with the OS. The fact that the OS is written in C is
irrelevant.
TFA is not just stupid, it is wrong.
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Re: (Score:3)
by Darinbob ( 1142669 )
A language let's you do stuff, a sequence of
instructions. A protocol may be a method to
communicate, but it's not the contents of that
communication. Ie, English is a protocol, but the
instructions on how to cook beef Wellington in an
English cookbook is a program.

Re:That's what I call BS (Score:5, Insightful)

by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Sunday April 03, 2022
@04:27PM (#62413814) Journal
Over the years, people have tried to make a better "low
level interface." We've seen LISP machines, we've seen
APL, we've seen FORTH machines, we've seen the
JVM, we've seen CRL, and a couple different iterations
of web assembly. Most of these have the goal of
making it easier for higher level languages to interact
with the computer.
C is popular because it matches what the computer
does (fairly well). I am happy to see Aria Beingessner
make another attempt along these lines. Maybe she will
come up with something impressive. But it isn't an
accident that things ended up this way. They ended up
this way because C is the best at what it does.
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Re:That's what I call BS (Score:5, Interesting)

by ceoyoyo ( 59147 ) on Sunday April 03, 2022
@04:35PM (#62413832)
Her problem appears to be that she'd like to use C
librairies someone has generously shared with her, but
she's astonished that nobody has written a Rust
interface for her. But OMG, if she HAS to, she'll write
her own. Except C headers are apparently impossible to
parse (except for C parsers). And OMG, what even IS a
long anyway?
There's a reason programmers used to learn assembly,
even if they never used it again. It teaches you all the
work that has to be done so you can have an i32 (32-bit
int for Rust people; I assume it's little endian?).
My own CS professor thought assembly was for
ignorant children and insisted we start with transistors
and learn about all the work that has to be done before
you can have luxuries like mov, jmp and add.
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Re: That's what I call BS (Score:5, Funny)

by BumboChinelo ( 2527572 ) on Sunday April 03,
2022 @05:15PM (#62413932)
You lucky bastard! We started with electrons and holes,
doping and band gaps
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Re: (Score:2)
by Antique Geekmeister ( 740220 )
My education started with chemistry, math, and
physics.

Re: (Score:3)
by K. S. Kyosuke ( 729550 )
You only learned to read and write *after* blowing up
your chem lab?

Re: (Score:2)
by jmccue ( 834797 )
Wow, you had electrons ? I had to first catch electrons
from Lighting. Harder than you think

Re: (Score:3)
by K. S. Kyosuke ( 729550 )
Electrons? I would have killed to have been able to
start with electrons.
It gets worse...it seems that the education of some
desktop application developers *ends* with Electron.

Re: (Score:2)
by evil_aaronm ( 671521 )
My own CS professor thought assembly was for
ignorant children and insisted we start with transistors
and learn about all the work that has to be done before
you can have luxuries like mov, jmp and add.
That would've been a cool approach; and probably an
easier one for my C language prof, who had a
background in electronics engineering, rather than
straight compsci. As it was, C was somewhat new to
him and college level curricula - my age is showing
itself, here. Because I'd already spent some time
playing with Turbo C, I was more familiar with C than
he was, and actually helped him present the material in
some cases.

Re: (Score:2)

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by blahplusplus ( 757119 )
That would've been a cool approach
Someone has already done it for those interested. Some
professors made this for everyone:
https://www.nand2tetris.org/ [nand2tetris.org]

Re: (Score:2)
by Cbs228 ( 596164 )
Her problem appears to be that she'd like to use C
librairies someone has generously shared with her, but
she's astonished that nobody has written a Rust
interface for her.
Rust has bindgen [crates.io] for this purpose. It uses
LLVM to dissect C headers and produce an (unsafe)
Rust wrapper for them. The programmer is still
responsible for checking over it and writing a higher-
level, "safe" Rust API if needed, but bindgen does most
of the drudge work.
an i32 (32-bit int for Rust people; I assume it's little
endian?).
An i32 has native endianness by default. You can
convert it to/from any endianness you want, but
arithmetic still needs to happen natively. Rust arguably
has better behavior [github.com] for arithmetic
overflow than C.
I frequently tell people that "C is th

Re:That's what I call BS (Score:5, Interesting)

by ljw1004 ( 764174 ) on Monday April 04, 2022
@12:46AM (#62414860)
There's a reason programmers used to learn assembly,
even if they never used it again. It teaches you all the
work that has to be done so you can have an i32 (32-bit
int for Rust people; I assume it's little endian?). My
own CS professor thought assembly was for ignorant
children and insisted we start with transistors and learn
about all the work that has to be done before you can
have luxuries like mov, jmp and add.
I did loads of assembly back in the 1990s. (first job was
writing assembly; did RISC stuff with arm chips; and
like your professor I built my own hobby CPU out of
logic gates).
But the world is so different now.
What has been humbling for me, now as a professional
programmer, is that the machine's behavior is so
different from the mental model I formed from
assembly. If I want to write a hash-table? -- the fastest
implementation in practice is now one that scans 256
hash lines in parallel using SIMD. If I want to write a
concurrent data-structure? -- the fastest implementation

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in practice is no longer one that uses atomic compare-

and-swap, but instead one that uses shards, and locks
an entire shard at a time, so it can use SIMD. If I want
to write a compiler? -- the fastest implementation is
now one that uses garbage collection (!!!) since AST-
walking produces so much junk on the shallow heap
that having a garbage collector wipe it out in one go is
faster than allocating and deallocating each piece.
So when I see someone reaching for assembler or C to
solve a problem or just to reason about how to solve a
problem? My first thought is that they're probably
leaving perf on the table. (unless they themselves are
the person who spent the past two years of their lives
pursuing this one small area).
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It's worse than that. It is propaganda. (Score:5,

Interesting)
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 03, 2022
@04:42PM (#62413842)
Their claim is so ridiculously stupid it really calls into
question the future of Rust if these are the sort of idiots
on their core team.
You have to ask, don't they know that? Assuming
they're halfway competent, apparently enough so to "be
on the team that implemented" two compilers. Maybe
not, and that's technical demerits on both compilers,
since they're then full of code by incompetent
programmers. But let's assume this for the sake of
argument.
Then what? Then they're spinning a narrative to justify
moving away from C, aimed at middle managers.
That's what.
On another note, I don't really mind if C would shuffle
the mortal coil, eventually. The thing is that most CPUs
are still "C machines", designed to, indeed, be decent
simulacra of really fast PDP11s. Certainly so compared
to, say, a lisp machine or a forth machine. Moreover,
neither swift nor rust offer abstractions that would lead
to efficiency in translating program code to run on
hardware other than a C machine. Meaning, neither rust
nor swift are capable of being better in this.
And then there's the tiny detail that rust cannot generate
code without llvm, which is written in C++, which in
turn is a rather gigantic bastard language based directly
on C. If you're talking about C not matching current
hardware well, what about C++? I think they can make
that case about as well as the case that rust or swift

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Why C Isn't a Programming Language Any More - Slashdot 20/04/2022, 14(24

would be decent C replacements.

So they spin a ludicrous narrative. But again, that's
aimed at giving clueless middle managers reasons to
move away from C, and, presumably, onward to rust.
So while this is utter and complete bollocks technically,
it is vaguely plausible to the intended demographic.
So, this message is for the same reason as why they
keep on proposing putting rust in places it won't shine.
This is propaganda.
If you want to do anything about it: Write a piece how
C, despite its failings, is still vastly superior in practice
to rust. And write it at a level understandable to a five
year old, ie, clueless middle management.
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Re: (Score:2)
by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 )
it is "close to the metal."
This, in a nutshell.

^-- This! This! This! (Score:2)

by Anon42Answer ( 6662006 )
English also is not a language because different people
speak it differently and there is no enforced standard.
Rust is not a language, but a chemical process

Re: (Score:2)
by Maury Markowitz ( 452832 )
> Not C's fault.
Well, it is to the extent that its popularity makes it the
one people copy.
You don't see a lot of people "wrap{ping} themselves
in a grotesque simulacra of COBOL's skin", for
instance.

Re: (Score:3)
by Bu11etmagnet ( 1071376 )
"When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a
scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean --
neither more nor less.'
'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make
words mean so many different things.'
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be
master -- that's all."
â Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Re: (Score:2)

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by shaitand ( 626655 )
BS and not BS. They are right, C is not and never was
supposed to be a low level language. C is a high level
language. ASM is a low level language and NEITHER
is machine code. The code these guys are writing is just
so far from the known universe that C looks close to
the metal in comparison.

Re: (Score:2)
by RightSaidFred99 ( 874576 )
Rubbish. One of the reasons C and C++ are still used is
because they allow you to easily, deterministically
(usually) know exactly what the compiler will do and
what the underlying code will look like, what the
structures you define will look like, stack usage, all that
shit.
If C is a high level, you are just turning it to 11. "Guise,
C is an 8, so C# is a 10 and RandoLangOfTheWeek is a
14!"
C is a low level language compared to almost every
other language in even semi-popular use.

Re: (Score:2)
by Catvid-22 ( 9314307 )
More like CS [github.io] than BS: "I am Aria
Beingessner, Gankra, and a cat."

Re: That's what I call BS (Score:2, Interesting)

by im_thatoneguy ( 819432 )
If you're writing code in a vacuum you aren't the
subject of this article.
The problem as the article states is that for anyone not
writing code purely for embedded systems or OS code
you'll almost always need to communicate with C code.
And that means you need to not just speak assembly or
bytecode you need to speak "C as defined by the
compiler that compiled the OS."
And that "C" is incredibly inconsistent, not just
between versions of "C" but between versions of a
compiler. Basic definitions like Long Long

Re: That's what I call BS (Score:3, Informative)

by loufoque ( 1400831 )
Is that a description of ABI as understood by a web
programmer?
Because it's wrong.

Re: That's what I call BS (Score:2)

by stoborrobots ( 577882 )
For a while, we had the inverse relationship - it was the

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Why C Isn't a Programming Language Any More - Slashdot 20/04/2022, 14(24

browsers which all defined their own behaviours, and

to interact with it, you had to know exactly which
browser and version you were running inside in order
to know how to make a call which got the result that
you wanted.

Re: That's what I call BS (Score:5, Insightful)

by EMB Numbers ( 934125 ) on Sunday April 03, 2022
@09:26PM (#62414582)
And that "C" is incredibly inconsistent, not just
between versions of "C" but between versions of a
compiler. Basic definitions like Long Long are
incompatible between different compiler versions.
ANSI/ISO C and POSIX have had "stdint.h" since
1999, and C++ has referenced it since C++11:
https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wik... [wikibooks.org]
https://www.cplusplus.com/refe... [cplusplus.com].
- int64_t
- uint64_t
- int32_t
- uint32_t
- int16_t
- uint16_t
- int8_t
- uint8_t
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

by Kisai ( 213879 )
It's the kind of complaint I see a lot by other
programming languages. "Nobody speaks my
language, why do I have to learn C"
Because C, IS the language closest to representing the
underlying hardware. C is to English as Java is to
French. French is maybe used in 3 or so countries, but
the vast majority of the world, including french-
speaking countries, learn English because that's the
language everyone can use, requires the least about of
knowledge of the grammar/syntax to be understood,
and the least amount

Re: (Score:2)
by znrt ( 2424692 )
i don't think this is BS. BS has usually an agenda, some
message. this is just nonsense, meaningless banter. it's
weird to read this from people you'd expect to be
intelligent.
oh well, i guess every sector has to have "influencers"

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of sorts now ...

Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)

by mustafap ( 452510 ) on Sunday April 03, 2022
@03:08PM (#62413610) Homepage
C is still perfectly acceptable and relevant for the vast
majority of computers on the planet. Just not the ones
the author works on. Microcontrollers far out number
servers, laptops, tablet, phones. Platforms on which the
author's comment are actually reasonable.
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Relative simplicity (Score:3)

by Okian Warrior ( 537106 )
C is still perfectly acceptable and relevant for the vast
majority of computers on the planet. Just not the ones
the author works on. Microcontrollers far out number
servers, laptops, tablet, phones. Platforms on which the
author's comment are actually reasonable.
And further, a lot of software has to be safety certified
and validated, for which C++ has a tendency to hide
processing in places that are not obvious in the code.
The relative simplicity of C is an asset when trying to
determine whether the code is correct.

Re: Relative simplicity (Score:2)

by ArmoredDragon ( 3450605 )
If that was true, there wouldn't be so much undefined
behavior going on in our operating systems, browsers,
etc, that lead to security vulnerabilities. Even well
known, seasoned programmers are susceptible to doing
this with C.

Re: (Score:3)
by solidraven ( 1633185 )
That's more due to layer upon layer of abstraction than
anything else. You can't invoke twenty libraries without
penalizing your code somehow.
Add in the fact that many paradigms also hide what's
actually going on and require absurd data transfer
strategies to fit within that paradigm (I'm talking about
you Object Oriented Programming), and you got a
massive problem - and then I'm not even getting into
the entire design pattern nightmare. Basically, common
sense problem solving and highly skilled programmer

Re: Relative simplicity (Score:2)

by ArmoredDragon ( 3450605 )

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Rust doesn't have that problem. The only way a library

I import with rust can break something is if that library
itself has a problem, which is pretty rare. The code I
write that uses it is guaranteed not to cause undefined
behavior, data races, etc. Sure, I could create a race
condition, but it won't ever cause memory corruption,
dirty reads, dirty writes, buffer overflow, etc.

Odd. (Score:5, Insightful)

by rlwinm ( 6158720 ) on Sunday April 03, 2022
@03:08PM (#62413614)
So as an embedded programmer with some 30+ years
of work on everything from real-time bare metal code
to embedded Linux doodads I guess I haven't been
programming in a language. Because even to this day I
don't hear a single engineer I work with (and I work
with lots of external companies of different cultures)
question the language we write in - in fact it's almost
explicit that it's C.

This article is pure garbage disconnected from reality.

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Re: (Score:2)
by ukoda ( 537183 )
Yes, pure garbage. Force them to write some machine
code for a few years and see if they still want to claim
C is not a programming language.

To make claims that C is like something else does not

take away from what it also is. If they claim it is used
as a protocol it does not follow that it can no longer be
considered a programming language. Apparently they
didn't teach them the basics of logic.

Re:Odd. (Score:5, Interesting)

by Darinbob ( 1142669 ) on Sunday April 03, 2022
@04:20PM (#62413804)
The foreign function interface protocol isn't "C", it's
generic programming. It's intended to be used with
Fortran, Pascal, and many others. Thus, simple
variables, simple functions, simple parameters, simple
return values. No one thought having an ABI was
weird until suddenly "how come it doesn't do it in a
way that's easier for my favorite language?"
This is why I avoid some new languages like the
plague, not because they're bad languages, but because
they have entire religious cult attached.

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C is not a programming language (Score:2)

by LondoMollari ( 172563 )
Just make any old crazy statement to get clicks. Profit!!

A billion implementations (Score:2)

by techno-vampire ( 666512 )
And I suppose PASCAL is better? It's always preached
top-down programming but effectively forced people to
write their programs bottom-up. Not only that, but for
many years there was no standard I/O package because
it wasn't originally designed to be compiled or run; just
checked over by the class's instructor.

Re: (Score:2)
by shanen ( 462549 )
What? Someone else still remembers Pascal? I just
tried to use it for a joke...

C is the lingua franca because it's a thin wrapper

(Score:5, Insightful)
by musicmaker ( 30469 ) on Sunday April 03, 2022
@03:12PM (#62413622) Homepage
Bits into bytes, bytes into words, words into structs.
Structs over buses and network cables. C isn't so much
the lingua franca as it is the most common and
successful abstraction over the physical way hardware
communicates with hardware. This author seems to
forget that C isn't itself the thing, it's the structures that
the hardware express that it is an abstraction over. No
matter what language you're in, you ultimately are
executing op-codes on a CPU. Swift, Scala, whatever
high level language you choose is ultimately always
going to be restricted in certain ways because that is the
physical reality of computing. I don't know what else
you want. It's literally how. it. works.
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Re: (Score:2)
by alvinrod ( 889928 )
C also made expressing ideas a good mixture of
concise while still remaining intuitive. There's a good
reason that most languages used today have borrowed
either in part or even quite heavily from it. Maybe there
are better ways that things can be done, but there are a

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lot of worse ways and that makes most changes side

grades or just a matter of personal preference over
improvements in the best case and just a good intention
that doesn't pan out in most others.

There's a reason that not only is C still ar

Not a serious article (Score:3)

by peppepz ( 1311345 ) on Sunday April 03, 2022
@03:14PM (#62413626)
It's written in such a clickbait way that it seems a
YouTube video. Even if it contained some valid points,
it's impossible for me to take it seriously.
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This is the most incredibly pretentious (Score:5,

Insightful)
by Otis B. Dilroy III ( 2110816 ) on Sunday April 03,
2022 @03:14PM (#62413628)
line of crap that I have ever read.
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Re: (Score:2)
by AlanObject ( 3603453 )
If I had mod points I would vote that up.
Idiots debating idiocy with other Idiots. I am supposed
to be impressed somehow with their sweeping vision of
What Is Wrong when my life is all about meeting some
contract deadline. That does not change no matter what
programming language I am using.

Re: (Score:2)
by Aighearach ( 97333 )
line of crap that I have ever read.
Luckily you don't often read about what Rust
developers say, then. LOL
This is par level stupid.

Wow (Score:5, Insightful)

by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Sunday April 03,
2022 @03:15PM (#62413632)
What an incredibly silly bit of verbal gymnastics. It's
almost as if the whole motivation was to get advertising
clicks.
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Re: (Score:2)
by Catvid-22 ( 9314307 )
Yes. Take this for example: "My problem is that C was
elevated to a role of prestige and power, its reign so
absolute and eternal that it has completely distorted the
way we speak to each other."
Reminds me of the English language though, as spoken
by people outside England. Many dialects are still quite
understandable.

Re: (Score:2)
by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )
That's not written to get clicks. That's written to get
grant money from humanities funding agencies.

Okay ... (Score:5, Insightful)

by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Sunday April 03, 2022
@03:17PM (#62413636)
I read the blog post and no more coffee for Aria.
My problem is that C was elevated to a role of prestige
and power, its reign so absolute and eternal that it has
completely distorted the way we speak to each other.
Rust and Swift cannot simply speak their native and
comfortable tongues — they must instead wrap
themselves in a grotesque simulacra of C's skin and
make their flesh undulate in the same ways it does....
C was here first -- or before Rust and Swift anyway --
and used, almost literally -- everywhere. Sound like
you're upset (or bitter/jealous) that it won't now get out
of the way (for, arguably, perhaps better
defined/implemented languages), but things are what
they are and C is, basically, the (or, at least, a)
"reference language". Get back to us when as many
things, including operating systems, are written in Rust
and/or Swift. Until then I'll keep C in the "Languages"
section of my resume.
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For a 50 year old language... (Score:4, Informative)

by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Sunday April 03, 2022
@03:17PM (#62413638) Homepage
...its doing quite well for itself being the language of
choice for most popular OS kernels not to mention
toolkits, DBMSs, compilers and interpreters so before
all those who worship at the alter of Guido come along
and tell us how much better Python is, go check what

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language Python itself is written in. Ditto most of the

other high level scripting languages too.
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Re: (Score:2)
by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )
Python is a great language. One of it's killer features is
how easy it is to incorporate C code.

Re:For a 50 year old language... (Score:4)

by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Sunday April 03, 2022
@04:32PM (#62413824)
Python is a great language.
Great, but ridiculous. Let me delete one tab and wreck
your entire program ... :-)
[If they'd add support for brace-delimited blocks (or
similar), I'd climb onboard. Until then I'll use Perl.]
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Re: (Score:2)
by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )
Oh damn! I see how well your C/Rust/Java program
works when I delete a curly brace! Wait a minute....
I've never seen the logic in that argument. A delimiter
is a delimiter. I thought curly braces were a step down
from good old begin/end or block/end block, but
whatever. It's not hard to write a preprocessor to change
your delimiter of choice into whatever the
compiler/interpreter wants.
Now, if you're one of those masochists who things an
appropriate delimiter is a specific length string of
identical charact

Re:For a 50 year old language... (Score:4,

Interesting)
by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Sunday April 03, 2022
@05:04PM (#62413912)
Oh damn! I see how well your C/Rust/Java program
works when I delete a curly brace! Wait a minute....
I've never seen the logic in that argument. A delimiter
is a delimiter.
Funny, but the C/Java/Perl etc... delimiters exist and are
relevant only at the start/end of the block, not on every
line of code within the block, like in Python. Get rid of
*all* the indention in C/Java/Perl and the code still
works, not so in Python.

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Re: (Score:3)
by evil_aaronm ( 671521 )
At least with a missing curly brace, or bracket, you can
track down where it's most likely to go without too
much trouble. Good luck trying to figure out where a
missing tab should go.

Re: (Score:3)
by Junta ( 36770 )
As one who writes a lot of Python code, it's more
workable than people pretend, but it *is* true that if
any sort of text processing step is going to mess with
anything, it's going to be whitespace, either deleting or
re-aligning. This usually isn't a problem when working
with programming editors, but sometimes referencing
code from instant messaging or a web forum makes
python impossible to parse as the respective software
'helps' reflow the whitespace one way or another.

Re:For a 50 year old language... (Score:4,

Informative)
by DamnOregonian ( 963763 ) on Monday April 04,
2022 @03:00AM (#62414980)
Oh that's nonsense. You delete a curly and your
program will not compile.

Fuck up a tab, and you haven't created invalid code.

You've created code that now has new and exciting
meaning.
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Re: (Score:3)
by feranick ( 858651 )
This is a bit unfair, as Python isn't really where the
criticism comes from. Anybody with same barebone
knowledge would know that Python isn't designed to be
a low-level language and frankly it doesn't even
pretend to. Heck, it relies on C for speed. (Nobody in
their sane mind would, say, propose to write kernel
code in Python). I think the grips come from languages
that do pretend to be as good as C (Rust, primarily). I
won't discuss the merits of their claim, but just say that
Python isn't the one you sho

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Is this an article? (Score:2)

by groktrev ( 5458264 )
Because it looked like a 25 sentence comment on a
quote probably taken out of context. C isn't a lot of
things because it's not meant to be. You don't grab a C
compiler looking for a package manager or an
interactive interpreter or a community manifesto. (Well,
maybe you read K&R, but it's handy and concise.) You
might want a standard library, but that's not really
necessary either, depending on your target. I like C
because I don't have to fight with syntax (I'm looking at
your Python) or do things t

Say what? (Score:3)

by ukoda ( 537183 ) on Sunday April 03, 2022
@03:33PM (#62413664) Homepage
"C is actually horribly ill-defined due to a billion
implementations or its completely failed integer
hierarch" ?!?!

To steal from the first Google reach result: "C has been
standardized by ANSI since 1989 (ANSI C) and by the
International Organization for Standardization (ISO)."

C can take the number of implementations as a

compliment but who would use anything other than
GCC these days anyway?

Yea, the integer size thing can catch newbies but you
soon learn to include stdint.h and if you are an
embedded programmer dealing with real world
hardware then things like uint8_t and uint32_t make it
pretty clear what the hardware supports.

The whole basis for their argument is flawed. The fact

that C is used as a reference point far beyond just
compiling and linking code does not mean it is no
longer a programming language. Can the authors really
call themselves programmers if they can't tell the
difference between '&', '|' and '^' in the logic of their
arguments?
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Re:Say what? (Score:5, Insightful)

by Entrope ( 68843 ) on Sunday April 03, 2022
@03:55PM (#62413702) Homepage
To be fair, maybe more fair than this load of bilge
deserves, C leaves a bunch of details up to

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implementers. A lot of those are (or were originally)

consciously left to the platform because there was a lot
more variation in integer sizes, representation of
negative numbers, pointer structure, and more when C
was being standardized than there are today.
However, an awful lot of the complaints from the
summary are not really about C itself, but about
platform specific binary interface standards. C doesn't
say "pass arguments using registers in order XYZ, then
spill to the stack". It doesn't say "leave the first page of
virtual address space unmapped to help detection of
null pointer dereferences". It doesn't specify how to
implement memory barriers or garbage collection or a
lot of other things. The complaints here mostly seem to
be sour grapes that library interfaces are defined using
languages other than this person wishes were in charge.
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Re: (Score:2)
by phantomfive ( 622387 )
It's also the first time in my life I've heard of a "C
integer hierarchy." I'm not sure how you can figure out
which type of integer is "above" or "below" another
integer.

Re: (Score:2)
by hawk ( 1151 )
apparently, it's about "endian privilege" . . .
[ok, I'll crawl back under my rock]
hawk

Hilarious. (Score:2)
by Gravis Zero ( 934156 )
"My problem is that C was elevated to a role of prestige
and power, its reign so absolute and eternal that it has
completely distorted the way we speak to each other.
Rust and Swift cannot simply speak their native and
comfortable tongues – they must instead wrap
themselves in a grotesque simulacra of C's skin and
make their flesh undulate in the same ways it does."
What an absolute drama queen.

Gibberish and nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)

by RightwingNutjob ( 1302813 ) on Sunday April 03,
2022 @03:35PM (#62413670)
The fundamental operations exposed to the
programmer by C are manipulation of memory
addresses and manipulation of numerical values stored

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at those addresses.
Say what you will about pipelines and RISC and
anything else, that's how any CPU operates at a high
level and that's how any hardware one would like to
control with a computer operates.
This is already an abstraction since it's talking in math
about digital circuits composed of transistors and
diodes and semiconductor junctions. There are other
abstractions that talk about computation in terms of
abstract datatypes and functions and pictures and
whatever, but as the summary says, it all has to
translate to numbers stored at memory addresses in the
end.
This rant strikes me as if it came from a moron or a
grifter. Since the ranter designs programming
languages, moron doesn't seem to fit.
File under "meaningless trash talk" and move on.
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Opinionated Subjectivism (Score:2)

by luis_a_espinal ( 1810296 )
I really don't know what they are talking about. Their
rant borderlines on ... feelings.

Javascript monkey I bet (Score:2)

by DrFalkyn ( 102068 )
[I]t has to call C APIs. This is done via Foreign
Function Interfaces (FFIs).... In other words, even if
you never write any code in C, you have to handle C
variables, match C data structures and layouts, link to C
functions by name with their symbols....
The real problem is that C was never designed or
intended to be an Interface Definition Language, and it
isn't very good at it.
Well no shit Sherlock. C has worked very well, and still
works well, for what it was designed for. Not so much
an "abstraction of assembly language" but a static, but
somewhat weakly-typed language that compiles to
efficient native executable code. And there's no way
getting around having to detail with the internal details
of how processors work at some point. Other languages
"solve this problem" by relying on C libraries. And
then they claim C is the problem ? If C was such a
barrier, there is noth

FORTRAN redux (Score:2)

by redelm ( 54142 )
... I've heard all of these about FORTRAN ... 30 years

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ago.

Re: (Score:3)
by phantomfive ( 622387 )
Only 30 years ago?

Re: (Score:2)
by redelm ( 54142 )
Well, mean things were said about FORTRAN for
much longer (since 1975 at least, Edsger Dijkstra) but
they weren't very coherant.

Re: (Score:2)
by phantomfive ( 622387 )
I would argue that these criticisms aren't particularly
coherent, either.

makes no sense (Score:4, Insightful)

by cjonslashdot ( 904508 ) on Sunday April 03, 2022
@04:08PM (#62413752)
"C is actually horribly ill-defined due to a billion
implementations or its completely failed integer
hierarchy"
Actually, C has a tremendously successful history of
being able to cross-compile to numerous architectures.
And as for not being a real programming language, a
few years ago I was writing a program in Ruby and
getting frustrated, so I started again in C, which I had
not used in 20 years, and after 40 minutes I had a 300
line program, and I got it to compile, and it worked the
first time.
To this day, my all time coding productivity record was
using C on a Sun workstation in the 80s, when one
Saturday I wrote 1000 lines of tested code in one day.
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Re: (Score:2)
by Maury Markowitz ( 452832 )
"Actually, C has a tremendously successful history of
being able to cross-compile to numerous architectures."
+1
And it's pretty much the only language that offers
interop with the language you don't use for speed. You
can include a C library in Java, Rust, Kotlin, Swift,
Obj-C *and practically every other language used
anywhere*. When there is some form of interop
between two languages on that list, it is *invariably
using a C-style wrapper*.

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Translation: "Legacy sux" (Score:2)

by smoot123 ( 1027084 )
[I]t has to call C APIs. This is done via Foreign
Function Interfaces (FFIs).... In other words, even if
you never write any code in C, you have to handle C
variables, match C data structures and layouts, link to C
functions by name with their symbols....
In other words "Dealing with legacy code pollutes my
pure and beautiful environment."
Suck it up, buttercup. No one likes working with legacy
code. Legacy baggage hobbles every new environment.
Sadly, it's cheaper in terms of risk and programmer
time to just deal with it.
Yeah, we know C has some huge shortcomings. C was
invented at a time when performance was really
important so K&R didn't add expensive abstraction
layers. C went on to be incredibly popular and built up
a huge code base. Sure it would ha

Re: (Score:2)
by phantomfive ( 622387 )
Sure it would have been nice if K&R realized 16 and
32 bit values were going to be too small and that
pinning down the data size model was going to matter
but you know what? They weren't omniscient. And if
they had, Unix never would have worked and the
whole problem would have resolved itself.
It's also a problem that has been solved by stdint.h

Re: (Score:2)
by smoot123 ( 1027084 )
It's also a problem that has been solved by stdint.h
Almost mentioned this. I think that's a pretty reasonable
solution to the int size issue.
I'm sure Rust calling C has all sorts of other problems,
like strings. I don't know what a Rust string or array
looks like but a cup of coffee says it's more
complicated than a char *.

Re: (Score:2)
by parityshrimp ( 6342140 )
In other words "Dealing with legacy code pollutes my
pure and beautiful environment."
From how some people approach this at my current
workplace (I'm in hardware, thankfully), it seems like
there's nothing worse than someone else's code.

type names (Score:2)

by DulcetTone ( 601692 )

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I never quite understood why C was had types int, float,

long, double, short (signed or unsigned), which do
nothing to directly specify width and not int, uint, or
float followed by 8, 16, 32 or 64, eg, uint16.

Re: (Score:2)
by phantomfive ( 622387 )
"int" is supposed to be the type of integer that runs
most "naturally" on the processor you are using.
That is, if you want to write code that will run easily on
a 16 bit machine, a 32 bit machine, and a 64 bit
machine, then you use "int" and you don't assume its
range.

Re:type names (Score:5, Informative)

by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Sunday April 03, 2022
@04:47PM (#62413868)
I never quite understood why C was had types int, float,
long, double, short (signed or unsigned), which do
nothing to directly specify width and not int, uint, or
float followed by 8, 16, 32 or 64, eg, uint16.
A lot has to do with the original implementation on the
PDP-11. The first answer on What is the historical
context for long and int often being the same size?
[stackoverflow.com] cites and references the C99
rationale [open-std.org] (PDF), section 6.2.5. I've
highlighted an interesting bit below:
[...] In the 1970s, 16-bit C (for the PDP-11) first
represented file information with 16-bit integers, which
were rapidly obsoleted by disk progress. People
switched to a 32-bit file system, first using int[2]
constructs which were not only awkward, but also not
efficiently portable to 32-bit hardware.
To solve the problem, the long type was added to the
language, even though this required C on the PDP-11 to
generate multiple operations to simulate 32-bit
arithmetic. Even as 32-bit minicomputers became
available alongside 16-bit systems, people still used int
for efficiency, reserving long for cases where larger
integers were truly needed, since long was noticeably
less efficient on 16-bit systems. Both short and long
were added to C, making short available for 16 bits,
long for 32 bits, and int as convenient for performance.
There was no desire to lock the numbers 16 or 32
into the language, as there existed C compilers for at
least 24- and 36-bit CPUs, but rather to provide
names that could be used for 32 bits as needed.
PDP-11 C might have been re-implemented with int as
32-bits, thus avoiding the need for long; but that would
have made people change most uses of int to short or

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suffer serious performance degradation on PDP-11s. In

addition to the potential impact on source code, the
impact on existing object code and data files would
have been worse, even in 1976. By the 1990s, with an
immense installed base of software, and with
widespread use of dynamic linked libraries, the impact
of changing the size of a common data object in an
existing environment is so high that few people would
tolerate it, although it might be acceptable when
creating a new environment. Hence, many vendors, to
avoid namespace conflicts, have added a 64-bit integer
to their 32-bit C environments using a new name, of
which long long has been the most widely used. [...]
In general, a Long is at least as big as an Int, which is
at least as big as a Short ..., a Double is at least as big
as a Float ...
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Re: (Score:2)
by dskoll ( 99328 )
There were computers with 36-bit words, you know. C
was designed (for better or worse) to be easy to
implement on a wide variety of computer architectures.
Nowadays, almost all digital computers have words
sizes that are a power-of-two bits, and <stdint.h>
solves the problem nicely without constraining the
actual compiler implementation.

Re: (Score:2)
by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 )
There were computers with 36-bit words, ...
Many CDC systems were 48-bit and, later, 60-bit. I was
a sysadmin for a few at NASA Langley in the late 80s /
early 90s, along with a Cray-2 and YMP -- the Crays
ran a version of System V Unix (w/BSD features)
called UNICOS.

In a way, they are correct (Score:3)

by mveloso ( 325617 ) on Sunday April 03, 2022
@05:03PM (#62413902)
In a way, they are correct: C has been around for so
long and it's been used by low-level people so much
that processor architectures and behavior are optimized
for C.
What does that really mean?
Here's an example: processor cache architectures
assume locality and sequential access, because that's
how C allocated memory: in a big block. The way that

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stacks are allocated are also an artifact. In fact, the

stack itself is an artifact of how C handles local
variables. It's difficult to imagine how else to handle
local variables at that level, really.
That said, that's what CS is about. I mean, GPUs have
now been optimized for vector operations. They can go
ahead and optimize CPUs for, well, dynamic
languages? It's unclear what you'd actually optimize
for. Object-oriented programming? Interpreted
languages? But then thinking outside the C box at a
low level will also be hard. It's difficult to say "how
would we represent an object" without thinking about a
block of memory.
Maybe it's time to dust off the old symbolic machines
stuff?
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Re: (Score:2)
by phantomfive ( 622387 )
People keep saying this kind of thing, but they haven't
been able to demonstrate it practically in any way.
Build a machine or a platform that is faster than C, but
so far that hasn't happened.
We can look at graphics cards as an illustrative
example, but it turns out they are faster only in specific
cases, and not in others. Furthermore, graphics cards
are interfaced through C (then Python uses C to
interface with them).
tl;dr C is faster in practice, despite some theoretical
reasons other languages might be

That C isn't a programming language anymore...

(Score:3)
by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Sunday April 03, 2022
@05:04PM (#62413906)
Of course those deeply involved in Rust and Swift will
lamely try to disparage other programming languages,
especially one like C that has such a rich history and
future. Doing so merely shows how little confidence
they have in Rust and Swift.
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Next generation of NIH (Score:3)

by evil_aaronm ( 671521 ) on Sunday April 03, 2022
@05:35PM (#62413988)
This article strikes me as the new kids trying to justify

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Why C Isn't a Programming Language Any More - Slashdot 20/04/2022, 14(24

their reinvention of the wheel. Not because their wheel

is any better, but because it's "new," and theirs.

Kinda like Poettering and that tragic bastardization

called systemd.
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Anybody (Score:2)
by pele ( 151312 )
Bothered reading "About me" for this..."person"? Says
it all really...

Looking for the story ... (Score:5, Insightful)

by KindMind ( 897865 ) on Sunday April 03, 2022
@06:12PM (#62414092)
... moderation button, to mark the story as -1 troll ...
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Wow, what total BS (Score:3)

by Maury Markowitz ( 452832 ) on Sunday April 03,
2022 @06:52PM (#62414174) Homepage
"the underlying computational models of modern
computers are nothing like the one that C represents,
which was designed for a 1970s 16-bit minicomputer."
More crap from the unwanted tabloid of the computer
world.
Modern computers are *literally designed to run C
quickly*. When I say literally, I mean literally, literally.
RISC-I, from where we get the term, was designed
specifically to run C and Pascal (which is largely
identical in opcode terms) as fast as possible. Here is
one of the early papers on the topic:
https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~kubitron/courses/cs252-
F00/handouts/papers/p216-patterson.pdf
As you can see in the tables at the end, the entire
system was based on statistics of C and Pascal
programs and was designed to make them run faster.
Among its key design notes was the decision to use
register windows, because they found that C programs
spend a LOT of time doing function calls, as much as
45% of *all* of the time in a program. As such, they
decided making this run as fast as possible would be
key to a new design.
Other what-we-now-call-RISC designs all followed the
same pattern. The 801 was based on studies of PL/1
and Fortran programs on IBM machines and reached

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Why C Isn't a Programming Language Any More - Slashdot 20/04/2022, 14(24

exactly the same conclusions. MIPS was based on

running Unix statistics, and came to the conclusion the
compiler could do the windows better than the
hardware but was otherwise almost identical to RISC in
design and layout. ARM was based on the RISC-I/II
design after they visited the lab and WDC. CRISP is
the "C-language Reduced Instruction Set Processor".
Motorola specifically talks about making Unix fast
when introducing the 88000.
How is it possible the author of that statement is so
utterly unaware of the history of the system they're
almost certainly writing those words on?
I'll agree with one thing, the machine you're running
isn't like the one C was designed for, *it's** much
more** tuned to run C than the PDP-11 was*.
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Identity vortex (Score:2)

by dsgrntlxmply ( 610492 )
When an entity identifies as a cat, it is announcing its
intent to curry favor until it decides to bite you in the
hand.

Re: (Score:3)
by Chris Mattern ( 191822 )
And then we could build a C++ compiler and also Java
Standard Edition on top of it. It would process GOAT
SE .CXX files.

I only came to eat popcorn (Score:2)

by shanen ( 462549 )
But I'm still kind of disappointed by the lack of Funny.
So...
Me? You really don't want to look at me and especially
not at my code. My C looked like Lisp. My JavaScript
looks like FORTRAN. And my Python can't decide if it
wants to look more like Pascal or SNOBOL.
(Strange small world phenomena. Dealing with some
really old papers yesterday, and I came across a page of
notes for printer configuration. From the days when
setting up your printer meant you had to use a hex
editor to insert the appropriate print

Re: (Score:2)
by theendlessnow ( 516149 ) *
If I were to implement a new version of C, I would call
it "Goat C" for obvious reasons.

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Why C Isn't a Programming Language Any More - Slashdot 20/04/2022, 14(24

Just as long as the editor used to write Goat C is vi, I

think you'll be fine.

Re: (Score:2)
by shanen ( 462549 )
Deserves a Funny mod. But what about Goat C Plus?

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