1y ago

What are your programming hot takes?

You're viewing a single thread.

896 comments

As an embedded firmware guy for 10ish years:
C can die in a fire. It's "simplicity" hides the emergent complexity by using it as it has nearly no compile time checks for anything and nearly no potential for sensible abstraction. It's like walking on an infinite tight rope in fog while an earth quake is happening.
For completely different reasons: The same is true for C++ but to a far lesser extent.
- What do you think of zig?
  
  I don't have first hand experience with it, I also don't get how it would help me. Maybe I need to look at it some more.
- I used to be this way about c++ too... But c++17/22 are not the same language as it was 10 years ago.. And it definitely isn't the language most firmware guys get to use it as.
  There is some truly wild shit in the templating system.
  
  I'm aware. I write C++17 and I try to be informed what the best praticed are for whatever version of whatever language I'm writing at the moment. But that's actually a reason to not like C++. It's painfully backwards compatible and what was good pratice isn't anymore because now there's a better one, but that better pratice isn't in anyway enforced because of backwards compatibility. And also I don't like templates, generics are superior to me, but that's a me thing.
  
  I too used to think generics were superior until I learned parameter packs, type traits and SFINAE.
- Ahh, the consequences of using the PDP-11 as your abstract machine.
  I find C fun in small doses, but if I ever had to scale up to an actual product, I'd quickly want to off myself from copy-pasting my vector implementation for every different type it needs to contain.
  (Of course, I could commit macro abuse to emulate generics, but... that's just asking for trouble.)
  
  Well it made sense! In the 70s, and just doesn't anymore. 🤷

896 comments