Is this article a sign that C has fallen out of mainstream use?
No, C (and C++) is used as much as ever. HN echo chamber aside, Rust and/or Go haven't made much of a dent.
No, we had such articles for decades.
No, it's just an article that points some issues with C, like exist for every language and environment (e.g. tons of articles on JS shortcomings). No correlation whatsoever with such an article and the language falling out of mainstream use.
No, this is a bizarro question. It's an article by single person, not some general trend.
Is this really true, especially for C? Lots of things that used to be done in C is today done in C++ and lots of things that used to be done in C++ is today done in Java or C#.
Only in HN world is C considered legacy. For the rest of the world, its the well-known workhorse of the software world.
HN is a bit of echo chamber as mostly SaaS, web and other high level application developers are here. For them C might be dead as well, but if you have anything to do with hardware and system programming, C is still the tool.
But it's a workhorse that's continually being replaced. I'm not talking about Rust&Go. I'm talking about C++/Java/C#. Thinking about C projects I saw 15-20 years ago, hardly any of them would be written in C if they where started today. And even in the embedded world C++ is becoming more and more of a thing.
Is C used, of course. Is C going away, of course not. Is C "used as much as ever", I just don't see it.
These devices are 99% of the time using C. ...therefore the number of C projects is growing, not shrinking.
http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/
It's #8 on GitHub in projects per language: http://githut.info/
And #18 on Stack Overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/tags
(and I'd say most C projects are not as likely to go to GitHub compared to JS or Javascript ones. And C programmers are not exactly the type to ask questions on SO, compared e.g. to some language where one can be an "eternal newbie".
>Lots of things that used to be done in C is today done in C++ and lots of things that used to be done in C++ is today done in Java or C#.
Lots of things that are done by Java or C# where done by other languages back in the day too. Visual Basic for enterprise apps that are now a web Java/C# frontend, Delphi, 4GL platforms, Clipper, Visual FoxPro, etc. Even games were written in assembler for most of the eighties too.
Basically, if you're not working in an add-on to a framework library written in javascript running in a web browser, you might as well be using punch cards. /s
I made the part about Reagent up, but you know you believed it.
We're so far from the metal we might as well be sending a telegram with our requirements.
In the five seconds it takes this crap to load and show you a still loading page, your CPU cores have done 40,000,000,000 sixty-four bit operations.
https://github.com/odoo/odoo/tree/10.0/addons/web/static/lib...
Just so that you can experience the full horror: Yes, the Python server ships XML templates with raw embedded Python code to the client. The client then parses the XML and interprets the Python using this py.js thing.
If the embedded Python needs to access the database (and it almost always does), the client makes calls to a JSONRPC interface on the server.
(If you ever think of using Odoo. Don't. Just... don't.)
*An open source ERP.