[andjd]

Serious question:

The article points out that:

`C is far removed from modern computer architectures: there have been 50 years of innovation since it was created in the 1970’s.`

Is there a C-like language that uses abstractions based on current ARM or x86 processors? i.e. something above assembly that learning would help us understand how these modern processors actually work?

[donkeybeer]

What language would? Even if you directly write assembly the microcode or pipelining layers are not visible to you, its abstracted in hardware itself. In that sense I think accusing C of not being hardware friendly because these aspects are not exposed to it is nonsense. These are not exposed to even assembly language forget any other higher level language. Regarding parallel programming and GPUs I think a better case could be made for alternative abstractions.

[nedbat]

My point wasn't that C wasn't hardware friendly. My point was that it doesn't teach you "how a computer really works". It teaches you a lower-level abstraction than Python does, but it's still an abstraction, and there's a ton of mechanisms at work that you can't see.