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by pcwalton 3689 days ago
> It's remarkable, though, that it's taken 40 years to make much head way in replacing C.

I don't agree: it's been a long process, but the trend is unmistakable. It's hard to remember now, but in the early '90s C and C++ were completely dominant. Nowadays they're much more specialized: you're as likely to build your company on Java or even Python/Ruby as you are to build it on C++. People talk about how it's hard to hire C++ engineers nowadays, while in the '90s "C++ engineer" was pretty much synonymous with "programmer". And so on.
3 comments
blub 3689 days ago
That's quite normal, because the market today is much larger and diverse. e.g: It doesn't make any sense to build web apps in C or C++ and this type of software is very spread nowadays but was virtually non-existing back then.

The interesting question is what will mobile devices, the IoT and embedded devices in general be programmed in? C and C++ are popular choices today, so the trend is not really "unmistakable".

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pjmlp 3689 days ago
Yes, but the majority of those devices, at least the ones with enough KB, use C or C++ for hardware integration or some interpreter, with the rest of the stack in something else.

Everything else usually has other languages available as well, one just needs to search for what is out there.

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bubuga 3689 days ago
> Nowadays they're much more specialized: you're as likely to build your company on Java or even Python/Ruby as you are to build it on C++.

Some of today's dominant platforms are developed mostly in Java (see Android), and web development targets the LAMP stack. This means that the business is centered in ventures that exclude most languages, not because there is technical merit on other alternatives.

I'm sure it's possible to gather some individuals that are more than willing to badmouth Java and Python with a passion with the same ease we see here people complaining about C.

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sytelus 3689 days ago
Guess which language was used to write your OS, browser, games, compilers, runtimes and so on. If you count the number of hours that people spend on software written with C/C++, I think all other languages would be left in dust.
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