Why Aren't There C Conferences?

Re:Why Aren't There C Conferences? by DonHopkins on Wednesday November 21, 2018 @03:37PM (#18505863)

Please tell me that CppCon isn't a conference just for the C Preprocessor?

I hate it when you go to one of those Makerfests, and it actually turns out to be about Makefiles.

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Re:Why Aren't There C Conferences? by inoiox on Wednesday November 21, 2018 @04:23PM (#18506227)

https://www.youtube.com/user/CppCon

Actually is a really good conference to learn Software Development beyond C++

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Re:Why Aren't There C Conferences? by simias on Wednesday November 21, 2018 @05:00PM (#18506450)

C++ is a wildly unstable language compared to C. Every new standard brings a slew of new coding paradigms and features, often changing the way to write C++ code pretty fundamentally. On top of that C++ is a hellish beast of a language of such tremendous complexity that you can probably host hundreds of conference where you'd teach even experienced C++ coders things they don't know. They won't run out of material any time soon.

Meanwhile a C conference would have a hard time coming up with interesting content year after year IMO. You'd end up having to talk about how C is used more than C itself, but then you're no longer really doing C-con, you're doing "embedded-con" or "high performance trading con" etc...

I agree with the parent when they compare C to a hammer, it's a super useful tool and I'm glad that we have it but it's not like I could talk about it for hours (or hear somebody else talk about it for that matter).

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Re:Why Aren't There C Conferences? by shaklee3 on Wednesday November 21, 2018 @08:15PM (#18507322)

This is completely false. C++11 introduced a lot of new paradigms, and that's it. That shift was for the better, and I haven't met a single person who can honestly say that the changes they made turned it into a worse language. Quite the opposite: it's more expressive, readable, and easier to use.

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Re:Why Aren't There C Conferences? by simias on Thursday November 22, 2018 @04:41AM (#18508973)

My comment wasn't meant to disparage C++, I'm not saying it's not improving, I'm just pointing out that it's a massively complex language and that it's still evolving in major ways so there's stuff to talk about. C hasn't really introduced significant "new paradigms" in a long while.

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Re:Why Aren't There C Conferences? by AlphaSite on Wednesday November 21, 2018 @02:43PM (#18505409)

To be honest C is kinda boring. Which is fine, but makes it hard to do a C conference.

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Re:Why Aren't There C Conferences? by varjag on Wednesday November 21, 2018 @02:48PM (#18505444)

Fair point, but Go or PHP hardly sound more exciting.

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Re:Why Aren't There C Conferences? by weberc2 on Wednesday November 21, 2018 @03:20PM (#18505723)

I'm a heavy Go and Python user, and you're right that Go isn't particularly interesting--it doesn't change terribly rapidly, but it's also simple enough that you can do interesting and useful deep-dive sessions into the garbage collector or scheduler or other aspects of the runtime or the toolchain. You could also speculate or discuss proposals for Go2. There have also been significant recent changes to the dependency management scheme which affect pretty much everyone.

I don't think there's much of an analog for C. Most of the interesting stuff in C revolves around things you would think you can depend on but actually break in really weird and interesting ways (misc undefined behavior, sizes for integral types on different architectures, idiosyncracies of the preprocessor, the way to trivially exploit that pattern you used to avoid buffer overflow exploits). But most of that is just depressing.

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Re:Why Aren't There C Conferences? by Koshkin on Wednesday November 21, 2018 @03:10PM (#18505641)

I guess, some languages have to fight for their place under the sun, some don't.

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Re:Why Aren't There C Conferences? by cies on Wednesday November 21, 2018 @03:13PM (#18505659)

That for different reasons. Go is not a general purpose language (it's creators specifically focus it's uses on networked apps). PHP is on the decline, nothing kills excitement like decline.

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Re:Why Aren't There C Conferences? by welly on Wednesday November 21, 2018 @04:44PM (#18506345)

Boring in what way? Some of the coolest stuff we work with is built with C. C is ace. C is cooler than C++

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Re:Why Aren't There C Conferences? by spork12 on Wednesday November 21, 2018 @05:41PM (#18506685)

I think it's more that C programmers don't really consider themselves part of a C culture in the same way that python, go, ruby, php etc programmers do. C programmers usually have another interest like kernel dev, firmware dev, or 3d game engines that is more interesting to them than the language itself.

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