[rumanator]

C has been "losing ground" not because of random per peeves of those who never wrote a line of code in C but because since C's last standard update there have been other programming languages that offer developers something of value so that the trade-off between using C or any alternative starts to make technical sense.

It also helps that C's standardization proceeds in ways that feel somewhat between sabotage and utter neglect.

Meanwhile, C is still the absolute best binary interop language devised by mankind.

[ratww]

> C has been "losing ground" not because of random per peeves of those who never wrote a line of code in C

This is not a random pet peeve, and WalterBright is as far as you can get from someone "who never wrote a line of code in C". This is the cause of numerous security bugs in the past and currently, and the reason most C material written in the 70s/80s is unsafe to be used today (mostly due to usage of strlen/etc vs strnlen/etc).

[WalterBright]

Frankly I never would have made the proposal if I didn't love C. I've made proposals to add D features to C++, too.

[boring_twenties]

Pro tip: Google the name of the person before responding to them, it can help avoid the taste of foot in your mouth which you are currently experiencing.

[msla]

> Google the name of the person before responding to them

Is it a rule at HN that you can't take someone else's name? Otherwise, there's no guarantee that you're talking to the "Real" Walter Bright...

... or that you're talking to that Walter Bright, come to think of it.

[datman347]

Anyone that has to rely on their name for an argument isn't worth listening to.

[shakow]

> Meanwhile, C is still the absolute best binary interop language devised by mankind.

You're mistaking the “C” ABI with the C language. The so-called C ABI should actually be called the UNIX-derived ABI, as (i) C doesn't define an ABI and (ii) C can perfectly produce binaries using another ABI (such as e.g. the “Pascal” one, common on the DOS platform).

[asveikau]

Maybe people are voting this down because they think it's directed at Walter Bright in particular, but I think there is actually some truth in the harsh comment.

Nothing about Walter Bright in this statement, but some of the harshest criticisms from others I have seen of C are not from expert practitioners in C.

People who are experts and also critics seem to have a more practical, realistic, nuanced critique, that understands history and challenges to adoption, admits that the long history and difficulty of replacing C isn't exactly for no reason.

[Gibbon1]

That's the way I interpreted it because it's true. A lot of the criticisms are misdirected one by people that haven't used C except being forced to use it for few assignments in school, C++ jockeys that think C is the 30 year out of date version of C that's supported by C++, and people that haven't used it at all for anything real.

I also agree that what the standard committee has been doing for the last 20 years amounts to willful sabotage.

[will4274]

> some of the harshest criticisms from others I have seen of C are not from expert practitioners in C.

But were they expert practitioners of C in the past? My experience is that most of the harshest criticisms of C come from former C experts who moved on to other languages because it became clear to them that C would never be fixed - Walter Bright included.

[WalterBright]

I also have extensive (20 years) experience with the solution I proposed.

[chromatin]

Lol at “never wrote a line of code in C”. Surely you are not addressing the article’s author?