Slashdot Mirror

I've been doing 'C' for a _long_ time (and I remember and used the =+ and =- operators).
I haven't run into these over-complicated details of 'C'; maybe I've missed them. Elegant,
yes, but over-complicated - no!

You don't see it. Perhaps you're simply too familiar with the thing to see what's right under your nose. The kid does see it. Or maybe he's being a special snowflake. Who knows?

Personally I think C is by no means perfect, there's UB in every nook and cranny, but on balance it's a useful tool for the knowledgeable. If you want overcomplicated, look at PHP. It doesn't have the trickiness that comes with the industrial power simple tools like C sport (and Unix famously has), but it does borrow drawbacks from every idea it incorporates, mainly by failing to understand wtf they're trying to do at every opportunity. And yet the thing is massively popular with a certain class of users. None of whom are very bright when it comes to writing programs, because if they were they'd've ran away screaming long ago. As have the good language developers, and yes, to those in the know, it shows.

Anyway, the "overcomplicated" argument is bunk and obviously reaching. It makes no sense to rewrite in another language the entire code base of a high quality project just because it makes one special snowflake feel safer. Especially not when said snowflake is probably only marginally trustable writing the thing, leaving contributing code so far in the mist it is funny in and of itself already. So the real reason is likely something different. Which it is, in this case. The question is a slur and a political one at that. Notice that rust has become a rallying point for a certain crowd with certain political views and outlooks. So the quoted question was really about politics, and it's fairly safe to say that anyone embracing rust is thereby making a political statement. Just like embracing poetteringware is a political statement, even if many in the scene are incapable of discerning that they are making a political statement by embracing poetteringware, since they got into computing exactly because they wanted nice and predictable things to play with, not those pesky humans and their politicking. The politicking came calling anyway; you can see it because of the fantasticallly poor quality of the code and the design and its mysterious success at adoption in the face of better quality alternatives being readily available. All those technical merit discussions weren't about technical merits. The opposition had lost before they started because their technical arguments weren't about what was really being discussed. And so we're stuck with fantastically bad code doing far too much for comfort and making itself artificially indispensible at a sensitive spot, where it really has no legitimate business being in the first place.

Likewise, the one bid to rust fame so far is in things done by mozilla. The torbrowser project is not mozilla, but heavily dependent on mozilla, so they more or less have little choice to acquiesce. The big thing is that they're not just standing by and have it happen, no, they're going big on embracing rust. So they're convenient poster children that aren't mozilla, making them good propaganda material. They also happen to have quite a strong strand of SJW going on, see the ongoing Appelbaum spat. Politics and code, what could possibly go wrong?

What is taught is being lazy - let the language do all of your thinking

"Well, what else is a computer for?"

This is a common theme in computing. Pervasive, even. Not limited to programming either. The whole "app" fad has shades of this, and so do political attempts at "progress" through "digital transformation", or whatnot. That scourge from that racketeering marketeering company, "windows", is a fine example. "N

Funny how the rest of the languages out there which do type conversion manage to avoid this shit: http://phpsadness.com/static/p...

HTH, HAND

I've seen the fractal article, and then I fact-checked it

Did you fact check [phpsadness.com] it using PHP [phpsadness.com] ?

I am not sure what that second bit of PHP sadness it really moaning about to be honest.

That might be you.

I've seen the fractal article, and then I fact-checked it

Did you fact check [phpsadness.com] it using PHP [phpsadness.com] ?

I am not sure what that second bit of PHP sadness it really moaning about to be honest.

That might be you.

Dude, you are the one who's flat out wrong. Not only C has transitive relationship operators, but the language specification actually states that value comparison operators must be transitive except in cases where precision is lost in type-casting of operands.

So, for example, this might fool the typical PHP developer...

int main(void) {
unsigned long a = 98765UL;
int b = -12345;
short c = 1;

if (a < b) printf("a < b!\n");
if (b < c) printf("b < c!\n");
if (c < a) printf("c < a!\n");
}

...while you're simply rounding off (modifying!) operands in the process. This can be easily show by controlling how casting is performed:

int main(void) {
unsigned long a = 98765UL;
int b = -12345;
short c = 1;

if (a < (long)b) printf("a < b!\n");
if (b < (int)c) printf("b < c!\n");
if (c < (short)a) printf("c < a!\n");
}

Compare this to the brainfuck that is PHP, where comparison rules are well stablished but still manage to produce this crap. I can't believe i'm actually discussing this.

I see. You're just confused by dynamic languages. Try the same operations in C, with the relevant casts, and note the results. Hey, look at that! Not quite so "nonsensical" now, is it?

Like I said, give that article a good fact-check. You'll regret ever recommending it.

"Dynamic languages" eh? Show me a "dynamic language" where i can do this (blatantly stolen from this site):

$ cat circular.php
<?php
 
$a = INF;
$b = array();
$c = (object)array();
 
var_dump($a < $b);
var_dump($b < $c);
var_dump($c < $a);
 
$ php circular.php
bool(true)
bool(true)
bool(true)

You're right though. Nonsense confuses me.

I've seen the fractal article, and then I fact-checked it

Did you fact check it using PHP?

I am not sure what that second bit of PHP sadness it really moaning about to be honest.

Ok, I understand the difference, but I also think that anyone who wrote code where the stacked ternary operators like that should be sacked. There are times when the ternary operator is useful, but it has to be used carefully if you want to keep your code easily readable by other people, stacking them like that is a quick recipe for unmaintainable junk useful for nothing else than building your own empire.

Also, wouldn't a few well placed brackets both solve the problem and make the code more readable?

I've seen the fractal article, and then I fact-checked it

Did you fact check it using PHP?

I am not sure what that second bit of PHP sadness it really moaning about to be honest.

Ok, I understand the difference, but I also think that anyone who wrote code where the stacked ternary operators like that should be sacked. There are times when the ternary operator is useful, but it has to be used carefully if you want to keep your code easily readable by other people, stacking them like that is a quick recipe for unmaintainable junk useful for nothing else than building your own empire.

Also, wouldn't a few well placed brackets both solve the problem and make the code more readable?

You think the language sucks because your only exposure to it is a messy code-base you inherited.

Or maybe it's because PHP really does suck the big hard one? Who knows? Total mystery.

I've seen the fractal article, and then I fact-checked it

Did you fact check it using PHP?

I've seen the fractal article, and then I fact-checked it

Did you fact check it using PHP?

There's even a website dedicated to PHP WTFs

Consider that a language (rather than a programmer) causes a WTF moment when it behaves other than would intuitively be expected according to its own rules of grammar. On that basis alone, PHP wins hands down.

Not the best PHP WTF site. Try PHP Sadness or A Fractal of Bad Design or even CodingHorror. In the interests of balance: A Fractal of Bad Design: A Rebuttal