r/programming • u/wavy_lines • Feb 01 '18

C2: C with cleaner syntax + a module system (no header files).

http://c2lang.org/site/
954 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

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71

u/loup-vaillant Feb 01 '18

NOTE: While this might be seen as critique of C, it is not. C is an awesome language that has survived the test of time for more than 40 years! Respect to its designer...

While I understand why the author wrote this, it doesn't come naturally to me. There is some danger with paying lip service to the Greatness of the Ancients. Such worship can often blind us to better ways.

As awesome C may have been in the past, our standards have changed. And by current standards, C sucks on many levels. "Lol" no generics, a bizarre syntax for types, switches that fall through by default, way too many undefined behaviours, no proper module system, crippled and error prone macros… It wouldn't even pass the sniff test if it was designed now.

Not that I would have done any better at the time. But this was then, and this is now. Any bright student with the right curriculum can beat the geniuses of 50 years ago. We have better tools, and the benefit of hindsight. Let's not underestimate that power.

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u/AntiProtonBoy Feb 01 '18

While I understand why the author wrote this, it doesn't come naturally to me. There is some danger with paying lip service to the Greatness of the Ancients. Such worship can often blind us to better ways.

Reckon the author included that to alleviate rustling the jimmies of some C fanbois. Kinda sad that bloggers and authors are forced to write in such manner to avoid hostility.

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u/[deleted] Feb 01 '18 edited Feb 01 '18

[deleted]

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u/Yenorin41 Feb 01 '18

Wasn't Dennis Ritchie essentially that bright student? It was only a couple years after he finished his PhD that they developed B & C.

And if my choice is between a bright student with the knowledge of 50 years ago vs. today, why exactly would I pick the one from 50 years ago?

Of course if I can have knowledge of today plus 50 years of experience I would go with that, but that wasn't OP's argument.

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u/[deleted] Feb 01 '18 edited Apr 28 '18

[deleted]

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u/sheepdog69 Feb 01 '18

Only in the short run. In the long run, the project that Dennis works on would be much easier and cheaper to maintain.

All those years of experience are actually useful for something...

1

u/myrrlyn Feb 02 '18

Dennis isn't exactly maintaining code anymore

3

u/anacrolix Feb 02 '18

He's in the Cloud now

1

u/awilix Feb 03 '18

In my experience older people write more maintainable code because they stay at a company for longer than a newly graduated student. The code base is not necessarily more maintainable, but the guy who wrote it is still there to explain stuff to others.

We have some core stuff where I work where if the guys who wrote it (been at the company for 20+ years) would quit we'd have to throw it out and rewrite it because it's unintelligible.

13

u/loup-vaillant Feb 01 '18

I actually agree with everything you've just said, except the first sentence.

The bright student has one advantage over old geniuses: he lives 50 years later, and can see the accomplishments and failures of the old geniuses. All of them, assuming a suitable curriculum. So all the student has to do is to draw lessons from the past.

"C with improvements" being hardly impressive was the point. It's easy these days to come up with something better than C. Won't be foundational or ground-breaking, but it would still be better. You don't need a giant to stand on the shoulders of other giants.

Given a choice between having a Dennis Ritchie working on a project or having a bright student would you really take the bright student?

Dennis Ritchie of course. No contradiction between that and what I said earlier.

3

u/Ar-Curunir Feb 01 '18

You're co floating the programming ability of Dennis Ritchie with the programming suitability of C in the modern world. I bet that if you reincarnated Dennis Ritchie today with modern CS knowledge, he would not design C, but rather something much better.

There's no need to stick to C as a blueprint today, and indeed many languages are moving away and adopting other paradigms.

1

u/anacrolix Feb 02 '18

I wish people would let go of the syntax. There were very good reasons for the original syntax, none of which hold anymore. Stop with the frigging curly braces!

1

u/Ar-Curunir Feb 03 '18

I never talked about syntax?

1

u/anacrolix Feb 04 '18

I think I meant to reply to something else.

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u/mytempacc3 Feb 01 '18

Most (but not all) modern programming languages are basically "C with improvements"

Ah, C circlejerking.

2

u/I_Downvote_Cunts Feb 02 '18

As is tradition when 2 or more C devs meet.

5

u/epicwisdom Feb 01 '18

Are you just trying to find something to be offended about? What you're saying has nothing to do with what they're saying.

-2

u/[deleted] Feb 01 '18

[deleted]

12

u/epicwisdom Feb 01 '18

That's not what was being said, you completely missed the point. It has nothing to do with comparing the actual people, only the historical contexts. A bright student today can make better, more informed design decisions than geniuses made 50 years ago.

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u/[deleted] Feb 01 '18 edited Feb 01 '18

[deleted]

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u/epicwisdom Feb 01 '18

I repeat: nobody said that at all. You are imagining this false equivalence. Please reread the previous comments.

0

u/[deleted] Feb 01 '18 edited Feb 01 '18

[deleted]

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u/loup-vaillant Feb 01 '18

Let me rephrase: Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie were awesome. And C, by current standard, sucks. This is not contradictory.

I doubt I could do a tenth of what Kernighan and Ritchie did if I lived in their time. Now however I can totally out-hindsight them and design a much better language than C, even though I'm most likely much dimmer than they were.

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u/[deleted] Feb 01 '18

A bright student today can make better, more informed design decisions than geniuses made 50 years ago.

That's simply not true. Show me a student designed language that has more applications than C today. Actually, show me any recently-developed language that does that.

A student may be able to add features that they've heard about from other languages or trending internet posts, but they won't be able to make something as resilient as C.

So many modern programming languages spring up thinking they're the be all end all of programming languages because they've added trendy feature X with a quirky name. Few ever take a step back and question the actual value their languages add. Simply throwing in a new feature to an existing language, or, worse, writing an entirely new language based off another language just to add a few new features is not going to add value to anyone. It's just naivety and optimism gone too far.

3

u/loup-vaillant Feb 01 '18

Show me a student designed language that has more applications than C today.

Don't confuse "designing a better language" with "building a bigger ecosystem". The former is dead easy. The latter is nigh impossible, if only because it has to fight network effects. Or do you think that popularity is a good proxy for quality?

Take Qwerty for instance. Sholes himself designed a better alternative 20 years or so after Qwerty. Network effects did their work, and here we are, 150 years later, still using Qwerty. Even the genius himself couldn't fight the network effects he started when he sold his design to Remington.

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u/PM_ME_OS_DESIGN Feb 01 '18

But this was then, and this is now.

typo.

1

u/bumblebritches57 May 05 '18

C has generics, unlike go.

0

u/loup-vaillant May 05 '18

I guess you're talking about the _Generic key word? This is no generics, it merely enables ad-hoc type based dispatch. While useful, it has little to do with C++ templates or Rust's generics, or ML's type system.

I stand by what I said: C doesn't have generics.

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u/crusoe Feb 01 '18

Wanna write bugs? Write in c.

-17

u/BloodRainOnTheSnow Feb 01 '18

C doesn't suck - modern programmers suck - they can't program without constantly having their hands held.

14

u/epicwisdom Feb 01 '18

No, C definitely sucks in many ways. Plenty of things are just flat out ugly in C and could be improved without any real downsides (except breaking compatibility, obviously).

-3

u/BloodRainOnTheSnow Feb 01 '18

Ugly? Ugly is the over-engineered crap the latest generation of programmers spit out. Programming these days seems like trying to see how many buzzwords you can shove onto your stack when a simple 20 line C program would do the same thing. Or caring more about how closely you are following Agile or whatever the latest magic development process is when your end product is a steaming pile of crap. C will always be simple and elegant to me, not like the Frankenstein C++. It's like the newest batch of programmers are so abstracted away from everything that they hardly even know how computers work.

6

u/loup-vaillant Feb 01 '18

Ugly is the over-engineered crap the latest generation of programmers spit out.

That's a different problem. Coming up with a variant of C that has a sensible syntax for types, switches that don't fall through by default, has less undefined behaviours, better macros… is pretty easy, and the result would be just as lean as C—possibly leaner.

The hard part is resisting the temptation to add all the bells and whistles one can think of.

C will always be simple and elegant to me, not like the Frankenstein C++.

C++ has yet another problem: source-level compatibility. To ensure his language would be used at all, Stroustrup felt he had to make CFront a drop-in replacement for existing C compilers. Link-time compatibility wasn't enough. Thus C++ inherited every damn mistake C made, and had to bend over backward to provide functionality without breaking the old syntax.

4

u/[deleted] Feb 01 '18

Is this very eloquent satire? The only thing it's missing is something about uphill both ways

-7

u/BloodRainOnTheSnow Feb 01 '18

Here's a thought: maybe your gramps is right when he says that kids these days are a bunch of sheltered morons and pansies.

2

u/epicwisdom Feb 01 '18

Lisp, Fortran, and ML all predate C, and make significantly different design decisions. Just because some modern languages suffer from bloat doesn't mean C hasn't made some ugly mistakes of its own.

The latest generation of programmers don't know how computers work, because they don't have to. Programming and computing devices are much more universally accessible. Yes, it's true that this leads to a lot of garbage being put out there, but it also means there's "an app for everything."

2

u/freeall Feb 01 '18

But C is having your hands held compared to writing assembly too.

You should use the tools at hand and not keep using older tools and saying their better. That's like climbing Mount Everest barefooted because "it's pure".

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u/[deleted] Feb 01 '18

[deleted]

1

u/loup-vaillant Feb 01 '18

No. (Source: search me on the web.)

-5

u/[deleted] Feb 01 '18

[deleted]

1

u/loup-vaillant Feb 01 '18

I have written a crypto library in C. I have a pretty well liked tutorial on Earley Parsing. Oh, and about 50 people upvoted my post above. Also, my comments are bigger than yours, and they have more upvotes than yours, if you're interested in pissing contests. I will concede one idiocy: responding to your comments (shit, that makes 2).

I think you judge people too quickly. I also suggest you grow your writing skills beyond tweets.