[amonith]

You do you. Most people don't care about software that much in general. The most important thing is that it does the job and it does it securely. C won't help you with bugs in any shape or form (in fact it's famously bug-friendly), so it often makes more sense to use a tech stack that either helps with those or lowers the cost on the developer side.

[GuB-42]

People care about the performance. There are numerous studies about that, showing, for instance a direct correlation between how fast a page loads and conversion rate. Also, Chrome, initially, the pitch was almost all about performance, and it was. They only became complacent once they got their majority market share.

It makes sense to use a tech stack that lowers the cost on the developer side in the same way that it makes sense to make junk food. Why produce good, tasty food when there is more money do be made by just selling cheap stuff, it does the most important thing: give people calories without poisoning them (short term).

[amonith]

Yeah but we're mentioning the performance of the language. People do have a baseline level of accepted performance, but this is about perceived performance and if software feels slow most of the time it's just because of some dumb design. Like a decision to show an animated request to sign up for the newsletter on the first visit. Or loading 20 high quality images in a grid view on top of the page. Or just in general choosing animations that just feel slow even though they're hitting the FPS target perfectly without hiccups.

Get rid of those dumb decisions and it could have been pure JS and be 100% fine. C has no value here. The slow performance of JS is not harmful here. Discord is fast enough although it's Electron. VS Code is also fast enough.

But I'd also like to respond to the food analogy, since it's funny.

Let's say that going full untyped scripting language would be the fast food. You get things fast, it does the job, but is unhealthy. You can write only so much bash before throwing up.

Developing in C is like cooking for those equally dumb expensive unsustainable restaurants which give you "an experience" instead of a full healthy meal. Sure, the result uses the best ingredients, it's incredibly tasty but there's way too little food for too much cost. It's bad for the economy (the money should've been spent elsewhere), bad for the customer (same thing about money + he's going to be hungry!) and bad for the cook (if he chose a different job, he'd contribute to the society in better ways!) :D

Just go for something in the middle. Eat some C# or something.

[dijit]

externalising developer cost onto runtime performance only makes sense if humans will spend more time writing than running (in aggregate).

Essentially you’re telling me that the software being made is not useful to many people; because the cost of writing the software (a handful of developers) will spend more time writing the software than their userbase will in executing their software.

Otherwise you’re inflicting something on humanity.

Dumping toxic waste in a river is much cheaper than properly disposing of it too; yet we understand that we are causing harm to the environment and litigate people who do that.

Slow software is fine in low volumes (think: shitting in the woods) but dumping it on huge numbers of users by default is honestly ridiculous (Teams, I’m looking at you: with your expectation to run always and on everyones machine!)

[1718627440]

> Most people don't care about software that much in general.

This is an example of not caring about the software per se, but only about the outcome.

> [C is] in fact it's famously bug-friendly

Yes, but as a user I like that. I have a game that from the user-experience seams to have tons of use-after-free bugs. You see that as a user, as strings shown in the UI suddenly turn to garbage and then change very fast. Even with such fatal bugs, the program continues to work, which I like as a user, since I just want to play the game, I don't care if the program is correct. When I want to get rid of these garbage text, I simply close the in-game window and reopen it and everything is fine.

On the other side there are games written in Pascal or Java, which might not have that much bugs, but every single null pointer exception is fatal. This led to me not playing the games anymore, because being good and then having the program crash is so frustrating. I rather have it running a bit longer with silent corruption.

[denotational]

A null-pointer dereference in C will be just as fatal (modulo optimizations).

[kelnos]

I think people also care that software runs reasonably quickly. Among non-technical people, "my Windows is slow" seems to be a common complaint.

[amonith]

Sure, but this is perceived performance and it's 100% unrelated to the language. It's bugs, I/O, telemetry, updates, ads, other unnecessary background things, or just dumb design (e.g. showing onedrive locations first when trying to save a file in Word) in general.

C won't help with any of that. Unless the cost of development using it will scare away management which requests those dumb features. Fair enough then :)

[renox]

> or just dumb design (e.g. showing onedrive locations first when trying to save a file in Word)

Your example is not one of a 'dumb' design, it is a deliberate 'dark pattern' --> pushing you to use OneDrive as much as possible so that to earn more money.

[hulitu]

> The most important thing is that it does the job and it does it securely

ROTFL. Is there any security audit ? /s

it does the job - mostly.