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Comment by doktrin | Hacker News Reader

> BCHS (pronounced /biːtʃəz/, beaches) is for real development. It's a hipster-free, open source software stack for web applications.

> Why C? fewer hipsters : hipsters dislike memory managment

Is this meant to be ironic? Spinning up web apps with C in 2017 seems like a supremely hipster thing to do.

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The hipster culture is the culture of counter-culture. A hipster aware of their hipsterness would therefore violate their internal value system. So yes, it's hipster thing. But the hipster is not aware. Or is at least pretending not to be aware.

Please see this handy flowchart:

http://pics.blameitonthevoices.com/102011/small_are%20you%20...

Yeap. Additionally, having a name without vowels and pronouncing it as if it had vowels is also pretty hipster, mustachioed as they say :)

Pretty much. I spent a year of my life maintaining a web app written in C circa 2002. Even then, it was a supreme pain as compared to Perl or PHP.

At about that time I knew a guy who insisted that the best web dev platform was AOLServer with application code written in C.

AOLServer + TCL was pretty slick

Yes indeed, oldies but goodies. This combo is still available and maintained, well, at least in the form of naviserver. Tcl of course has continued in active development and as useful as ever.

https://bitbucket.org/naviserver/naviserver/

http://tcl.wiki/

I worked on a startup that had an AOLServer kind of clone, it was wonderful.

However in our case only the DB drivers and Apache TCL module were written in C, everything else was pure TCL.

Those were days. https://books.google.cl/books?id=AS81GLj403kC&lpg=PA113&ots=...

Back in 1999 I managed a similar thing written in C with flat file storage. The whole tool chain chucked out a static binary and a directory full of templates and you just cp'ed it to the target and restarted the process.

When I look back I've got to be honest and say that it was actually a thing of beauty. The heavy lifting required for some core functions was quite bad but the whole thing pales in comparison to some of the enterprise and microservice based c# behemoths I have looked after since which require literally hours of head scratching to deliver a simple change.

I'd rather spend that time writing C than scratching my head. I'd have a lot more hair now.

you can duplicate that experience with go web dev today! :)

I have actually tried that and you're right. The whole experience made me consider going back to electrical engineering when I realised that the status quo hadn't improved in 20 years :)

Have you looked at Lua+C and LuaJIT+nginx (CloudFlare, OpenResty)? Work is underway to compile a subset of Perl6 to LuaJIT+nginx.

I can't get over the 1 based indexes in Lua, unless that has changed in recent years.

Still there :) The trade-off is rapid development (interpreted, GC), fast execution (JIT faster than Javascript) and easy interfacing to C libraries.

I shall have a try next week and see if I can cope with it :)

Using C is just plain dumb these days. I would have thought that avoiding memory safety bugs is worth the price of some "hipsters".

Edit: it would appear to be ironic

Found the guy for whom C was too intimidating!

Well I can program in assembler if that pleases you, oh blessed dmr prophet. C is simply not worth using unless you have to due to existing constraints etc.

Not to mention hiding acronym jokes behind IPA.

They hated hipsters before it was cool.

A Real hipster programmer would use Fortran (and use arithmetic if statements) or PL1/G if they are lazy and want to handle text better.

Trendster vs hipster is a thing now. I think I don't keep up with the trends anymore. But yeah next step we use assembly.

WebAssembly is a thing...

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