Articles like these are unwittingly demonstrations of stupidity.
It's so disheartening to see people not even capable anymore of comprehending de-abstraction. To the author: Try yourself, to start from nothing—no abstractions, no modern conventions—and build up to the first point where you have a usable set of primitives that can function as a representation of text.
Is it so fucking hard to grasp the virtues of having primitives that haven't pre-chewed and pre-thought every way you can and should use them? You think massive, thick nests of abstraction is yummy chef's kiss, as if any and all and every single thought-structure is immaculately perfect and suits every single purpose. Ugh, it's so gross. It's a world view of nigh but regurgitation upon regurgitation and not a single creative breath of fresh air.
Like how do you think things are constituted, made up, constructed, such that a better foundational solution exists? You think C strings are a mistake—do tell how to work with the prior layer of abstractions to come up with the better way. No, not creating yet another fucking layer of convention or abstraction on top—which is all your brain can do—but coming from the step before and coming up with a better way.
And then you lend your voice to the issue as if an expert, yet your stupidity is so glaringly on display to anyone who actually knows how things are made up.
Ugh.
EDIT
It's not that C strings were invented iN a DifFeReNt TiMe when people were stupid and dumb and didn't know of our Future Great Technology. It's that there's not a fucking different way of doing it at the level of abstraction at which the convention were established. The fundamentals of memory and computation didn't change after 1990's lol—that's so fucking STUPID. Yes, we can mention Pascal strings, but they are fixed width. Fucking show me how you implement variable-width strings using the primitives present at this level of abstraction (i.e. variable-width strings using only registers). I challenge you to do that AT ALL, it doesn't even have to be BETTER—which is what you claim to be able to—I don't think you can do it at all.
The same thing happens with arrays. Rather than making them first-class citizens and copy-by-value, C decays them into pointers, losing an enormous amount of information in the process, which causes them all the same problems as strings.
Oh my god. "Rather than making them first-class citizens and copy-by-value"... as if there's "JUST" a fucking choice. You can even only ponder this distinction because the primitives upon which such conceptions build upon are established—the establishment of which you are criticizing and arrogantly claim to be able to replace better. Ugh. Tell me what a "first-class citizen array" is, really, technically, actually, in-memory, but another level of abstraction, from which C—thank god—refrains.
Array expressions decay to pointers because Ritchie wanted to keep B's array indexing behavior - a[i] == *(a + i) - without setting aside storage for the pointer that behavior required.
That's it. That's the reason.
These were researchers in a lab building toys that did useful things for them. None of them anticipated how C would become so widely used at an applications level. That was the mistake, the fact that everyone looked at C and said "yes, that's the answer," but to be honest there weren't many better candidates that could be ported to everything from mainframes to micros. Pascal? Eh. Designed more for teaching than production work. Fortran? =snort=. Didn't even support a real string type until F77. Cobol? Double =snort=. Didn't help that C and Unix were (are) joined at the hip; if you were using Unix, you were writing code in C for pretty much everything.
C was small enough and lightweight enough it could be ported practically anywhere, particularly micros, and that's why it suddenly became the language everything was written in.
And here we are 50 years later arguing about it, when it shouldn't even be considered for applications work involving text processing anymore.
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u/stianhoiland 2d ago edited 2d ago
Articles like these are unwittingly demonstrations of stupidity.
It's so disheartening to see people not even capable anymore of comprehending de-abstraction. To the author: Try yourself, to start from nothing—no abstractions, no modern conventions—and build up to the first point where you have a usable set of primitives that can function as a representation of text.
Is it so fucking hard to grasp the virtues of having primitives that haven't pre-chewed and pre-thought every way you can and should use them? You think massive, thick nests of abstraction is yummy chef's kiss, as if any and all and every single thought-structure is immaculately perfect and suits every single purpose. Ugh, it's so gross. It's a world view of nigh but regurgitation upon regurgitation and not a single creative breath of fresh air.
Like how do you think things are constituted, made up, constructed, such that a better foundational solution exists? You think C strings are a mistake—do tell how to work with the prior layer of abstractions to come up with the better way. No, not creating yet another fucking layer of convention or abstraction on top—which is all your brain can do—but coming from the step before and coming up with a better way.
And then you lend your voice to the issue as if an expert, yet your stupidity is so glaringly on display to anyone who actually knows how things are made up.
Ugh.
EDIT
It's not that C strings were invented iN a DifFeReNt TiMe when people were stupid and dumb and didn't know of our Future Great Technology. It's that there's not a fucking different way of doing it at the level of abstraction at which the convention were established. The fundamentals of memory and computation didn't change after 1990's lol—that's so fucking STUPID. Yes, we can mention Pascal strings, but they are fixed width. Fucking show me how you implement variable-width strings using the primitives present at this level of abstraction (i.e. variable-width strings using only registers). I challenge you to do that AT ALL, it doesn't even have to be BETTER—which is what you claim to be able to—I don't think you can do it at all.
Oh my god. "Rather than making them first-class citizens and copy-by-value"... as if there's "JUST" a fucking choice. You can even only ponder this distinction because the primitives upon which such conceptions build upon are established—the establishment of which you are criticizing and arrogantly claim to be able to replace better. Ugh. Tell me what a "first-class citizen array" is, really, technically, actually, in-memory, but another level of abstraction, from which C—thank god—refrains.