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Comment by jetru | Hacker News Reader

Bashing C is like bashing English. Well, maybe Tolkien Elvish might have a better grammar system, but really come on now.

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Natural languages and programming languages aren't really comparable. The former evolve and are beholden to their history, because you can't tell people how to speak. The latter are user interfaces, and to suggest that the only meaningful criterion in user interface design is that it should match what previous designers have done is just self-evidently silly.

> you can't tell people how to speak

you can't tell machines how many bits to use.

Actually if you're the engineer designing the hardware, you most certainly can tell the machine how many bits it's going to use.

> The former evolve and are beholden to their history, because you can't tell people how to speak

Think about that for a moment in the light of Python 2 - Python 3 or K&R C - C99 or original C++ - C++14

"The former" refers to natural languages, not programming languages. What you cite is one of the primary reasons I called the two classes incomparable. If programming languages worked like natural languages do, Python 3 wouldn't have been controversial, or exist.

You seem to be making the assumption that English is as popular and widely used as C. I would like to remind you that it is only the case in western parts of the world, which is by far, not the majority.

Everyone in China learns English now, and a lot of the Far East has English (or Panglish, Singlish etc) as a major language. And it's pretty popular in India.

Nor sayng it's perfect and universal, but it is pretty widespread even outside "The West"

Not quite. A lot/most of Chinese have only learned Chenglish. That's not a criticism; it's an observation.

IME, Indians and Germans who use English are generally extremely proficient in it.

I think it's a reasonable assumption. The people who can speak English, whether as a first, second or foreign language, is about 1.5 billion.[1] Comparable to Mandarin speakers.[2] So, about 20% of all humans.

What proportion of developers can write C at an analogous level to first, second or foreign language? 20% seems like quite a good ball park estimate, from my (anecdotal) experience.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_Chinese

Note that the numbers for English are from 2006, the numbers for Mandarin (960 Million) are from 2010 and they lump together all the different (not mutually intelligible) dialects of Mandarin.

Noted, but it doesn't detract from my point about C. The number of Mandarin speakers was only to refute the OP's assertion that an anglocentric view of the world biases the opinion of how popular English is as a world language; this is not the case, it is genuinely popular.

I think it's actually more popular (relatively speaking) than your numbers suggest because of the points I mentioned.

Indeed :)

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