Overshadowed by Steve Jobs' death, this man is responsible for far more innovation.

*promote

Self promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Wednesday, October 19th, 2011 4:38am PDT - promote requested by original submitter schlub.

This guy was a hero of mine.

exit;

From Wiki:
"C (pronounced like the letter C) is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973..."

... and still going strong. That says it all.

>> ^chtierna:

From Wiki:
"C (pronounced like the letter C) is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973..."
... and still going strong. That says it all.


That's unfortunately true. No disrespect to dmr; C was a great language for it's time, and tonnes of great things were achieved with it, but it's well past it's use by date for most tasks.

Honestly, outside of embedded programming, if you sit down and start writing new code in C these days, you need your head examined.

That said, dmr was one of computer sciences true innovators, and will be missed.

Embedded programming is currently one of the biggest programming fields out there. Add to that any sort of low level system programming (such as the Linux kernel), and you'll see there's a reason why it sees so much use to this day. It's certainly not an easy language to use, but if you want results in those fields, you use it.
>> ^ChaosEngine:

>> ^chtierna:
From Wiki:
"C (pronounced like the letter C) is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973..."
... and still going strong. That says it all.

That's unfortunately true. No disrespect to dmr; C was a great language for it's time, and tonnes of great things were achieved with it, but it's well past it's use by date for most tasks.
Honestly, outside of embedded programming, if you sit down and start writing new code in C these days, you need your head examined.
That said, dmr was one of computer sciences true innovators, and will be missed.

You also have to consider that many, many newer languages have their roots in C. And many share the same (or similar) syntax since C is used as their model (C++, Java, Javascript, C#, Perl, D, etc...). But, I definitely disagree that C is past its prime. It is still used everywhere, not just embedded programming. It's used for drivers, OS kernels, windows apps, shell apps, compilers, interpreters, windowed desktop managers, etc, etc, etc... It's not great for RAD though, that's for sure!

C rullz!!

>> ^schlub:

You also have to consider that many, many newer languages have their roots in C. And many share the same (or similar) syntax since C is used as their model (C++, Java, Javascript, C#, Perl, D, etc...). But, I definitely disagree that C is past its prime. It is still used everywhere, not just embedded programming. It's used for drivers, OS kernels, windows apps, shell apps, compilers, interpreters, windowed desktop managers, etc, etc, etc... It's not great for RAD though, that's for sure!
C rullz!!


Yes, it's still used everywhere. No, that's not a good thing. 99% of the time you read about some security vulnerability being patched, there'll be a C buffer overrun there.

Is it still a useful tool? Absolutely. When you get down to the really low level stuff, it's everywhere and the reason it's everywhere is because it's so trivial to write a compiler for. But for the majority of people, there's simply no reason to use it and yet many still do, hence we have security issues, applications that leak memory and painters algorithms everywhere.

Writing a program in C is like preparing a meal with fugu. In the hands of someone who knows what they're doing, you can have a great meal, but get it wrong and you poison your guests.

I need to read up on this guy. Everybodys talking about C, but UNIX also? thats pretty cool in my book. For years , my companys network ran on SCO-UNIX , we never had problems , just kept working year after year with little adminstration. Easiest years of my admin life.

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>

void main()
{
int years;

printf("Hello world!\n");

for (years = 1; years < 70; years++) printf("Happy birthday Dennis!\n");

printf("Goodbye world!\n");
}

@ChaosEngine

Do you hold out any hope for D?

DMR was always okay with being blamed for some flaws in C. It doesn't mean he didn't change the way shit got done. No doubt there have been many giants since, but his status is const (which is one you can probably blame DMR for).

A lot of the features people seem to think would improve C are the features that would completely defeat the purpose of the language. Adding object-oriented features would add overhead (and OO features can be imitated through coding techniques anyway). Adding exception handling adds HUGE overhead. Adding garbage collection, like Java? Ridiculous amount of overhead. Methods for catching dangling references: more overhead. Pretty much anything you do add is going to degrade the language for its specific purpose.

Now if you can afford to handle some of that overhead, you have C++ as an alternative, which was made to introduce some of those extra features, yet still maintain its speed. And this is what many projects do. The Linux kernel needs to be as fast and efficient as possible, and so it uses C. On the other hand, there are desktop environments like KDE that use C++ instead to take advantage of those extra features and aren't as concerned with raw speed considering the environment they run in. And this continues all the way up to higher level languages.

As for insecurities and bugs, there is no reason to blame the language. Even in the hands of a good programmer, any language is a liability. Java is the perfect example, due to its enormous adoption in the early 2000s. There are TONS of Java programs out there that are insecure, buggy, and error-prone, and yet one of the goals of the language was to minimize this. Is it easier to make these mistakes in C? Of course! But it's nonetheless a necessity in the programming world.

Just take a look at the Linux kernel. It's written ENTIRELY in C, and yet it's certainly more stable and secure than the Windows kernel, which is a combination of C and C++. (And go ahead and suggest to Linus Torvalds that it should be switched to C++ or some other "more modern" language. He'll give you a nice 10 page essay on why you're wrong.)

Oh, to add to that, most of the drivers written for your computer are written in C.

The point is that C is most definitely NOT past its prime, and in fact due to the embedded systems industry, it's getting a resurgence.