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Discussion on: 5 Powerful Programming Languages to Stretch Your Brain

 
vimmer9 profile image
Damir Franusic • Edited

I don't know why is everyone so afraid of C. I am currently in embedded world where almost everything is done in C and haven't noticed any issues or complaints if proper procedures are followed. Of course, it's not as easy as languages which are hardware agnostic, but given the fast paced evolution of hardware, you can know run Node.js apps even on Single Board Computers like Raspberry for example.

There will always be fans and groupies of every possible language out there, that's just how human mind works, and affiliating yourself with your viewpoint proponents is our inherent nature.

I am still convinced that C is not going anywhere, and concede your arguments against it. Although, I don't see anyone rewriting back-end software to any other language any time soon, maybe never.

In my opinion, C will stay here until NLP (Natural Language Processing) finally evolves enough to understand semantics, and from that point on, the mindset of every developer will evolve into something we cannot even conceive at this point in time. Whether the evolution of NLP will overcome this obstacle and get us closer to creating AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), this is yet to be seen.

We can talk about the present, but I wanted to give you my take on how the future might look. AI may seem powerful now, but it still has a long way to go. Image recognition aside, human languages are still misunderstood and impossible for a machine to understand without the proper understanding of semantics.

I may have gone a tad too far with this; my intention was to mitigate the potential tensions between opposing language proponents :)

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aminmansuri profile image
hidden_dude

I have no problem with C.. I programmed for over a decade in C and C++.

But its not for web programming.. and its not ideal for all scenarios.

I'm not afraid of it at all.
I just think there are better tools for the job.

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vimmer9 profile image
Damir Franusic • Edited

Of course it's not for web. Maybe with Web Assembly but I think Rust will take over in that specific area, maybe, who knows.

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androthi profile image
Androthi

to be fair, C can't be included in a list of "languages that stretch your brain"

it can't be included because C is the granddaddy standard measure. all the other languages are compared to it.

for my list of languages that stretch your brain i would have:

  1. assembly
  2. prolog
  3. forth/factor
  4. clojure
  5. eh. maybe thrown BF here, just for giggles.
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vimmer9 profile image
Damir Franusic

Number 5 will not only stretch it, but probably also displace it 😄

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androthi profile image
Androthi

i don't think rust is an adequate replacement for c/c++. it's a language with a very specific purpose.
it's great for writing security software, or software that needs to be proved. i think rust is more in competition with ada. and i kind of prefer ada.
rust just doesn't have the ... agility that C has.

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androthi profile image
Androthi

modern software engineering practices gave us the likes of facebook and twitter. both of which have a garbage code base.
just because something manages to steam along as long as you throw the latest bit of hardware at it doesn't mean it's good engineering.

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vimmer9 profile image
Damir Franusic

I think I mentioned that once. Just because we have more powerful hardware doesn't mean we have to write less efficient software. Nobody cares about optimisations and memory efficiency these days. I used to play great games on my Atari ST with 1Mb of RAM. It sounds like scifi today, to have only 1Mb of memory.

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androthi profile image
Androthi

should have figured.
i started out on the c64, then on to the amiga. in my experience, people who started out with those early systems grew to appreciate hardware limitations and getting every last bit of processing power out of them.

now with everything practically being emulated and a dozen CPUs living in each computer, programmers don't care about resources or efficiency. as long as they can roll something out quickly and it functions relatively fast.

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vimmer9 profile image
Damir Franusic