What's To Love About C?

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."

Comments

Shorthand for Assembler

[codefool]

The power of C is - and always has been - that it is a shorthand for assembly. It compiles very small and runs very fast, making it ideal for embedded systems.

Re:One good reason...

[AuMatar]

I like C++, but I can think of a few. Lets ignore for the moment things like macros that are outdated in C++ and kept for C compatibility. We can easily get rid of:

*Value templates.
*Diamond inheritance (just make it illegal)
*The entire algorithms part of the STL. Nobody uses it and it makes for unreadable code (keep the container classes, of course)
*Kill either structs or classes. We don 't need both, with one being syntactic sugar to change the default visibility on the other
*The iostream libraries. I don't think I've ever seen code that didn't say fuck that and just use C style stdio. They're clunky.

That's off the top of my head, without going into things we could do better. And I like C++, it's my preferred language. The real argument here is even though C++ is bloated, it's far from the worst that way. Perl takes that crown, with it's 500 special variables. And the people who complain about C++'s bloat generally like Python or Ruby, which are both just as bloated as C++, without the bonus of it's simplicity.

Re:One good reason...

[bluefoxlucid]

Compare C++ to Objective-C. You might dislike the syntax of Objective-C some, but it has clear advantages:

• It is a strict superset of C: C compiles as Objective-C (C++ doesn't, since structs have a different syntax, among other things)
• More importantly, it is runtime-resolved. That means you can expand Objective-C classes without breaking the ABI; in C++ you can't add members to classes, at all. Class members can be in different libraries, and in different header files (a "private" member is one not exposed in the API, but you COULD access it directly by defining it or including the header for it).
• The mangling in C++ is a serious pain and makes loading C++ libraries and programs retardedly slow.
• Swizzling (you can replace members of classes at runtime--not just inherit, but actually overload class members) makes the language quite a bit more flexible.
• Operator overloading and templates are an abomination, and don't exist in Objective-C.

We can all supply better languages for a purpose; Objective-C and C++ have the same purpose (an object oriented general purpose native compiled mid-level programming language), and so this comparison is relevant. Comparing to Java or Python or C#.NET would be irrelevant.

A loose argument can be made that Objective-C is better because of its much better polymorphism features--the main point of an object oriented language. Objective-C does indeed supply much more flexible, more useful polymorphism; C++ class inheritance is pretty rigid because of its rigid ABI. Objective-C's run time resolution enables this, and I would admit that run time resolution of class objects is a bit slower ... if it wasn't optimized by cache (i.e. resolve the first time on demand and build the PLT) AND if C++ class member mangling didn't make actually building the PLT at load time so god damn slow. Two points to Objective-C.

Objective-C doesn't have operator overloading. Operator overloading is often claimed as a negative feature because it makes code hard to read. The effective argument AGAINST operator overloading is is that everyone is used to the 'cout >>' and 'cin

The biggest argument for operator overloading is really that nobody uses it, so we're all familiar with the corner case syntax in the standard library. Think about that: the biggest argument for it is that it never gets used.

Also, Objective C has reference counting with cycle detectors and all. Garbage collection is a limited feature (you can create garbage collected objects intentionally).

It's actually relatively easy to argue that C++ is an abomination. It's not unexpected either: it's an old language, and an OOP shim hacked on top of a well-designed mid-level language. That C is so well designed is surprising; but then it is the legacy of assembly, PASCAL, FORTRAN, and BASIC. COBAL is circa 1959, BASIC circa 1964, C circa 1972, C++ circa 1984. C++ had only Smalltalk to learn from, really, and was trying to be C with Classes.