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by rramadass 141 days ago
> If at least C solutions took advantage of abstract data types as advocated by modular design approaches

People have been writing C code with ADTs and "Modules" from the very beginning.

Two excellent examples which come to mind are; Andrew Tanenbaum's Minix book Operating Systems Design and Implementation and David Hanson's C Interfaces and Implementations: Techniques for Creating Reusable Software.

And of course the Linux Kernel is full of great modular C techniques which one can study.
1 comments
pjmlp 141 days ago
Unfortunely I have seen plenty of counter examples since 1991.

Starting with RatC from "Book on C", 1988 edition, over to Turbo C 2.0 in 1991, all the way to modern times.

That is just not how most C codebases look like.

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rramadass 141 days ago
Nope, you are just generalizing your opinion which is not quite true. My (and my colleagues) experience studying/programming C/C++ from the beginning-90's has been pretty good.

When the PC explosion happened, a lot of programmers without any CS background started with C programming and hence of course there is a lot of code (usually not long lasting) which do not adhere to software engineering principles. But quite a lot more C code was written in a pretty good style which was what one picked up at work if not already exposed to them during studies.

I still remember the books from late-80's/early-90's on the PC side, by authors like Al Stevens (utils/guis/apps using Turbo C) who wrote for Dr. Dobb's Journal. On the Unix side, of course you had Richard Stevens, P.J.Plauger, Thomas Plum etc. They all taught good C programming principles which are still relevant and practiced today.

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pjmlp 140 days ago
Each one is their own anecdote.

I have also all those books and magazines, pitty most coders of the code I have seen on my lifetime don't.

The regular developers, those that don't give a shit online forums exist, other than Stack Overflow, and go home to do non computer related stuff after work.

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rramadass 140 days ago
As i said, you cannot generalize from your experiences alone.

You have to look at the programming community as a whole and industry practices developed and adopted over time in the real world.

There is enough data here to show that C does not deserve the negativity that i often see here on HN.

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