I think there’s a lot to love about the idea of C, but its reality is much messier and more annoying.
Being around for fifty years doesn’t automatically mean it get polished to a sheen, because C is not one single artifact that one single group worked on for fifty years. Instead, it’s got fifty years of weird legacy cruft accumulated from divergence between various implementations, concessions to historical constraints that no longer apply and (yes!) human error.
This is kind of by design. The process by which C is developed (including the ANSI/ISO standardization processes) is very focused on backwards compatibility. That makes it an amazingly stable environment, there is tons of decades-old C code being used unchanged in production with modern compilers. However, that also means that all the really bad parts can’t ever truly be fixed. If you want something that looks like a perfectly cut and polished gem after fifty years, you need a process that is able to sand off some rough edges once in a while. I think we can have a systems programming language designed through such a process, even for decades, but it can’t also simultaneously have the kingpin role that C plays for compatibility and interoperability.
I think there’s a lot to love about the idea of C, but its reality is much messier and more annoying.
Being around for fifty years doesn’t automatically mean it get polished to a sheen, because C is not one single artifact that one single group worked on for fifty years. Instead, it’s got fifty years of weird legacy cruft accumulated from divergence between various implementations, concessions to historical constraints that no longer apply and (yes!) human error.
This is kind of by design. The process by which C is developed (including the ANSI/ISO standardization processes) is very focused on backwards compatibility. That makes it an amazingly stable environment, there is tons of decades-old C code being used unchanged in production with modern compilers. However, that also means that all the really bad parts can’t ever truly be fixed. If you want something that looks like a perfectly cut and polished gem after fifty years, you need a process that is able to sand off some rough edges once in a while. I think we can have a systems programming language designed through such a process, even for decades, but it can’t also simultaneously have the kingpin role that C plays for compatibility and interoperability.
score 1 · canonical