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> I suspect that for many who have tried, going from a web dev environment to a C oriented dev environment feels like a robust shock to the system.
> I'd also be willing to bet that there's an age bias at play here; C has been around, like, forever. It is certainly not the new hotness. Most (not all) people that I know who enjoy it and are proficient at it, are 40 or older. As someone who went the "other direction" (Java -> Ruby -> Javascript) I can say that a lot of it has to do with the accessibility of the ecosystem rather than the language itself. This could absolutely just be my filter bubble, but I've noticed that the communities surrounding Ruby, Python, and Javascript seem to go above and beyond the call of duty when it comes to making libraries easy to use, documenting those libraries, building and refining the tools, and so on. I know there are good tools out there for C development. I know there are good learning materials. I know there are communities out there dedicated to writing good C code (Shout-out to /r/c_programming on Reddit. Love those folks.) But I can't sort out the signal from the noise, because there isn't a lot of discussion about C programming happening in the online spaces I'm familiar with. As a counterexample, there was a _fantastic_ article on here the other day about "writing your own syscall" in Linux. Yes, it contains a lot of hand-holding and overexplanation, but that's useful for me because I haven't built up the mental model to parse a more terse explanation. In fact, I think this is how having "the new hotness" change every couple years has been helpful _in some respects_- there's an incentive for lots of people to write blog posts, tutorials, and articles about how to properly use the latest and greatest tech, there's active development going on as people forward-port functionality (and therefore plenty of opportunity for devs to make meaningful contributions and have meaningful discussion about "how to write code using this language/library/framework"). For a short period, both the "old hands" and the newbies are in the same boat, and this is unbelievably useful for training up the next generation of developers. > Me personally - I love it all. C, C++, Java, Python, Javascript, Rust, Haskell, Scheme, etc. Making computers do things for you, and for other people, by writing detailed instructions is quite possibly one of the funnest things in the world. Double bonus for getting paid to do it! Same here, friend. :) For what it's worth, I wish there were more of this attitude floating around the Internet. |