NireBryce

reality is the battlefield

the first line goes in Cohost embeds

🐥 I am not embroiled in any legal battle
🐦 other than battles that are legal 🎮

I speak to the universe and it speaks back, in it's own way.

mastodon

email: contact at breadthcharge dot net

I live on the northeast coast of the US.

'non-functional programmer'. 'far left'.

conceptual midwife.

https://cohost.org/NireBryce/post/4929459-here-s-my-five-minut

If you can see the "show contact info" dropdown below, I follow you. If you want me to, ask and I'll think about it.


DecayWTF
@DecayWTF

Part of the reason I hate C so much is that the last project I wrote in C was an X window manager and I realized how much shit I was reimplementing that has been standard in any language worth anything at all since the 70s.

It also made me hate X.


NireBryce
@NireBryce

C is groundbreaking because it's the only language people still use where arrays are just vibes


NireBryce
@NireBryce

C doesn't really have a standard library, not like python does. instead you need to know how to find a lot of things people already wrote, that probably contain the same bug every single person who stepped here before you missed too, in an unbroken line to 1978

but like not in a fun hero's journey sense


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in reply to @DecayWTF's post:

we love C - we learned it in the late 80s when, no, that stuff was NOT standard in other languages yet, though certainly Lisp had it - but we would never use it for a new project today, unless it was very small and purely for recreation

Yeah, hash tables were not a standard language feature for a long time but ALGOL 68 and PL/I both had quality string facilities; ALGOL even had pattern matching. Dynamic strings were a pretty common feature as well, as was better dynamic memory management

oh absolutely. neither made the leap to being popular on microcomputers, for reasons that we just realized we don't adequately understand... we think the Microsoft C compiler may have had something to do with it, but really we don't know. we wonder who we know who would.

That's

actually an interesting question and I feel like the answer lies with Unix winning in the early 80s? C was the prestige language... Digital Research released a microcomputer PL/I compiler in 1980 for instance, but it never took off. But yeah I'd love to know if anyone who was actually Around Then might have more insight

thanks! we try :)

hmmm yeah

we were EXTREMELY YOUNG at the time, so although we were learning to program and even picking up an autistic special interest in computing history, we weren't absorbing that kind of detail just yet

we'll ask around, if we remember, and report back

I had to google what X was, but I can say I've had a similar experience writing C code for WinAPI functions that require a HWND and working w/ the stdout/stdin, and especially getting asynchronous scroll wheel to work.

I think the combination of "Language with very few implemented features" and "Implementing other people's code" can be pretty awful a lot of the time.

in reply to @NireBryce's post: