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by jokoon 4170 days ago
It's not the 80s anymore, there area many cases where there are much better alternatives to C.

But it's still a language you need for certain things, like responsiveness or real time applications. Like linus torvalds said it, C is like a more comprehensive assembly generator than anything else.

Having such a language allows you to change every little boring details to do exactly what you want. It has its use, and it's surely not intended to be mainstream as of today. But there are many cases where C comes back as a constant common denominator.

It's sure that it's kinda shitty that there's nothing really better than a language designed in the 70s, but I guess you could either blame language designers for not making anything better. There also are business/political issues and preferences for certain things that comes into play.

All in all, C just seems to be pretty good when you want to have code that works well with systems. Maybe there's just inertia as to where computer development is headed, which might be heavy related to C.

All I wish, is someday to be able to learn some more "virtuous" language like haskell, scheme, or smalltalk.

2 comments

The 80's already had Mesa and Modula-2, but then those guys at Berkley had to create a few successful startups.
You may want to look up the age of those "virtuous" languages you listed. While it's fun to bash C, you could drive a damn yacht through the undefined behavior in Scheme. High-level languages are not immune here.