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by va_coder 5117 days ago
People who love C love it, in part, because they are often solving interesting problems with it. Many problems that require C are interesting: embedded software, automated robots, new databases etc. Most problems that C is not good at - Web development - are not that interesting to many people that love C.
2 comments
tosseraccount 5117 days ago
C is not good at web development? Most of the "web" stack is written in C: OS/NGINX/apache/php/java/perl. If you do write the top of the stack in C, it will run faster than anything else and be smaller. This means lower turnaround time which is VERY IMPORTANT in web apps. C, in many cases, is the best Web language.
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sgk284 5117 days ago
In what world does runtime speed and compiled size have anything to do with turnaround (or programmer productivity, as I read it)?

C is a great language for many reasons, but let's not conflate benefits.

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tosseraccount 5117 days ago
Perhaps there's a misunderstanding in the term "turnaround". I meant it in this sense t = x + y + z. where t = total time, x = send time , y = processing time, z = send back to user time. If you can decrease y, you decrease "t". Responsiveness is important to users. With the advent of large and extremely fast memory cache, small program size will dramatically increase program execution speed by have small code and small data already in cache. Smaller program executable will enable many more instances on a real physical node. Size matters. Speed matters.
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splicer 5116 days ago
I wrote a CGI in C around 2005. The C code produced only a small about of XML. All the presentation layers were done using client-side XSLT, CSS, and a bit of javascript. The result was very portable and efficient: we had to support serving from z/OS mainframes that used EBCDIC, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Linux, and Windows.
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puivert 5117 days ago
None of those require C, and are frequently done using high level languages.
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Jach 5117 days ago
Your comment may have gone over better if you included specific examples. For one, here's a story about Lisping at the Jet Propulsion Lab: http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html
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