UbrtrbNchDneRle
UbrtrbNchDneRle on Hacker News
C is fun for playing with pointers and doing raw memory things, but it becomes overwhelmingly painful and frustrating so quickly. And for the wrong reasons. Once you have to touch macros, or want to reuse code, it is just … old. Not hard, not minimalistic - just old. C can be fun the way bash can be fun, or baking without a recipe. It is fun to overcome an arcane mess, for the challenge. But you really learn little, or the wrong thing.
And C is not easy to look up online either. It took me so many hours figuring out some things are just not possible in C (without making it a new language via macro madness). Things that should be possible. Like „generics“. Kinda possible, but never satisfying. You constantly have to endure verbosity over abstraction. Not because that’s how computers work, but because how people did it 30 years ago, or because some industrial microcontroller needs it this way.
IMO whatever C can teach you, assembly can do better. Without tricking you into believing it’s a practical choice for most anything.
I think Rust is visually offputting for new students and it’s not really a good choice, but at least you learn something important, when things get hard. In C you are either trained to view programming as the most repetitive, joyless activity ever, or to indulge in hacking your way around broken shit, disregarding cooperation (with your future self), universal elegance and safety.
If there is „one language everyone needs to learn“ it’s some accessible and fun, which let’s enjoy computers and not tell you limits at every opportunity. There is no way to avoid C entirely, if you enjoy programming anyway; at some point you have to interface or tweak C, most likely.
I think it’s possible we, as a social species, just have an elaborate model of other people and things in our brain which gets mixed up with the experience of self under certain conditions and the brain is coming up with unifying explanations trying to achieve homeostasis under the influence.
On a serious note, I don’t have any problems with GIMP, 2.10 is supposed to have hiDPI support. Have you tried Krita and MyPaint?
Either way, I was hinting at a possible liberation through the laptop/desktop/server ARM SoC market, which is certainly coming. I think x86 is “over”.
Minimalism/down-sizing is a lasting trend, I think quite a few people are fed up with being hooked to modernity’s love bombing and are up for making the phone a tool again.