I work almost exclusively in embedded C and even I can’t agree with this. Just for starters, those two statements are not mutually exclusive.

Which is a problem for developers who simply want to write code without having to reason about whether it’s safe to dereference something, and without having to worry about a simple oversight resulting in the programmatic equivalent of summoning Cthulhu.

>a problem for developers who simply want to write code without having to reason

Still not seeing the problem.

Pointers aren’t magic and aren’t hard.

Pointers, conceptually speaking, are not hard.

Pointers, in practice, are hard. Even C-family compilers cannot safely reason about them in many (most) cases.

Oh boy, trying to debug some miscompile because of a subtlety in aliasing rules would make me disagree.

As a C compiler engineer I can assure you it has problems.

Did I say C didn’t have problems? Or did a say it’s not a problem that C might allow you to do unsafe things?

I think so?

“As an embedded engineer I can’t agree that C “has problems” because it treats you like a big boy with your big boy pants on. :)”

Do you know what “because” in that sentence means?

Edit: Nah, that’s OK. Just downvote and scamper on. Make HN more like Reddit, that’s what this place needs!

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

Well I took it to mean that because you think it treats you as a "big boy" you don't think it has problems.

Oh and I have no idea how to downvote on HN. Not that I care, but I don't see any downvote buttons.

There is no such thing as "big boys" in software engineering, there's only humans which have certain cognitive weaknesses.

C is really good at exploiting those, while at the same time giving programmers a feeling of power.

So providing a feeling of power over the language and it's abilities is not a legitimate advantage of the language?

Isn't that why everyone loves python, solving a complex problem in a handful of easily readable lines of code?

The feeling of power is nice for the programmer, but it doesn't influence the technical capabilities of the language, which are deplorable safety-wise.

Did you see the smiley face in my post that’s implied I’m kinda joking.

Also... I’m a little concerned that your post has “we’re all equal” social justice vibe to it... which is silly. C is more powerful than because “safety features” aren’t there.... deplorable... LOL.

You try going a day without using something programmed in C.

Oh boy, how I wish I could have at least one day without something programmed in C. I'm so sick of all the vulnerabilities...

No social justice vibe was meant. I was trying to say that we're all bad at dealing with the kind of errors which appear in a typical C or (perhaps to a lesser extent) C++ program.

I know that some people are able to do this more successfully than others because of skill, etc, but it's not just about certain individuals. As a whole, the C community has a really poor track record at security and safety and that has a lot to do with the language itself.

Tone is a tough thing to get right, and I'd say your initial post came off pretty condescending to a lot of people, regardless of whether you meant it or not. It's not even a C thing either, I've seen the same thing where someone declares functional programming as the only "serious programming" and category theory is easy, so everyone else is wasting time with imperative languages. So, it's a bit off-putting.

Every single day back when I was developing software for ZX Spectrum, Amiga and MS-DOS, before UNIX's influence took over the industry and forced us into dealing with C.

Thankfully there was already C++ for those of us that wouldn't move into such a limited language versus what something like Turbo Pascal 6.0 for MS-DOS was already capable of, feature wise.

Ok... so if I’m getting the idea here... C is more limited, but also dangerous because it gives direct access to memory and pointers making it dangerous.

Man... to listen to hackernews tell it... no one should use C!

I wonder how many comments describing how bad C is are from people on Linux machines?

The problem is not direct access to memory and pointers as such, every systems programming language needs to provide such features.

The problem with C, versus other systems programming languages it that it its pointers, implicit conversions of array into pointers, integer operations, string and array bounds don't have any kind of validation.

On other systems languages disabling such validations is explicit.

C is like JavaScript in the browser, we have to put up with it because UNIX clones won the market of commodity OSes.

C on its own without UNIX, would have failed in the market.

On the desktop world it was already being replaced by C++, Smalltalk, VB, Delphi and 4GL before FOSS based on UNIX and C started to be widespread.

Unfortunately it is impossible to convince people on pure UNIX based OSes to use something else.

Fortunately, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Sony, Nintendo are able to set which programming languages one is allowed to use on their platforms and C is on the way out on their SDKs.

LOL yea, C is going away alright. Just as soon as every company you mentioned and everyone else in the world stops making embedded electronics!