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What's To Love About C?

Posted by samzenpus on from the favorite-tool-in-the-box dept.

First time accepted submitter edA-qa writes "Antiquated, clunky, and unsafe. Though beloved to some, C is a language that many choose to hate. The mass opinion is indeed so negative it's hard to believe that anybody would program anything in C. Yet they do. In fact a lot of things, even new things, are programmed in C. The standard was recently updated and the tools continue to evolve. While many are quick to dismiss the language it is in no danger of disappearing."

1 of 793 comments (clear)

  1. Re:because - by FrootLoops · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    Those ignorant fools probably need to get off your lawn too, eh :)?

    I've programmed in assembly and C. I lack the patience to build a computer out of logic chips, but I've at least designed some stuff in logic gates. I've also implemented hash tables. Yet I still don't particularly like C, mostly because I find the syntax clunky. Specifically...

      * Semi-colon line endings are stupid--they serve little purpose besides making compilers easier to write
      * for (...;...;...) syntax is less intuitive than eg. VB.NET's "for a = 1 to 10" or numerous alternatives
      * declarations are unintuitive (and complicated; see post above for example)
      * I'm not fond of curly braces--I like Python's indentation better
      * Why make logical operators symbols instead of words?
      * operator precedence can be unintuitive
      * = vs. == causes bugs (many languages have the same trouble though)
      * comments (//) use two characters instead of one
      * switch's use of break is worse than eg. Ruby's case statement with commas

    (I have other issues, like disliking how many mundane details you have to specify in C compared to other languages, but you need a language like C for certain tasks and it'll need lots of mundane details to translate almost directly into assembly anyway.)