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Hacktical C: practical hacker's guide to the C programming language

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218 points signa11 | 2 comments | 14 Apr 25 10:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.437s | source
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pjmlp ◴[14 Apr 25 13:43 UTC] No.43681194[source]▶
> The reason I believe C is and always will be important is that it stands in a class of its own as a mostly portable assembler language, offering similar levels of freedom.

When your computer is a PDP-11, otherwise it is a high level systems language like any other.

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grandempire ◴[14 Apr 25 15:17 UTC] No.43682246[source]▶
Which other popular language more accurately represents a random access machine of fixed word length?
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pjmlp ◴[14 Apr 25 15:28 UTC] No.43682371[source]▶
I don't know, Ada, Modula-2, Object Pascal, PL/I, NEWP, PL.8, D, Zig, Mesa, ATS,....

But then again, you booby trapped the question with popular language.

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guywithahat ◴[14 Apr 25 15:43 UTC] No.43682583[source]▶
If a language is unpopular, people won't want to work for you and you'll run into poor support. Rewriting a library may take months of dev time, whereas C has an infinite number of libraries to work with and examples to look at.
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pjmlp ◴[14 Apr 25 16:15 UTC] No.43682910[source]▶
Moving goalposts regarding systems programming languages features, some on the group predate C by a decade.
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guywithahat ◴[14 Apr 25 16:35 UTC] No.43683148[source]▶
Being old doesn't mean anyone knows the language. I mean if the language predates C significantly and nobody uses is then there's probably a really good for it. The goalposts aren't moving they're just missing the shot
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OCASMv2 ◴[14 Apr 25 19:12 UTC] No.43684997[source]▶
Popularity isn't a measure of quality. Never has been and certainly not in the case of programming languages.
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grandempire ◴[14 Apr 25 19:59 UTC] No.43685645[source]▶
There is unpopular - and then there is can I get a working toolchain for modern OS that’s not emulated.
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1. OCASMv2 ◴[14 Apr 25 21:57 UTC] No.43686764[source]▶
Still not a measure of quality.
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2. grandempire ◴[14 Apr 25 23:00 UTC] No.43687227[source]▶
Are we having a discussion about the greatest language of all time? What’s your context here.