On the other hand, so much gets done, it would be insane to go back to "C for all the things!".
It's a trade off, you're either a high level hacker, piping stuff together and watching for leaks, or your a low level system guy, squeezing the carpet.
The same argument ("so much gets done") was made for Visual Basic back in the day, you know. Oh, how the hoipolloi cried and crowed for the death of C developers back then. Oh, how they were wrong, oh so wrong!
I'm not saying the world doesn't have a debt to pay to the Node/Javascript camp - it surely does. I just feel that there is something really missing in the scene, if in fact things that C developers knew and applied well 'back in the day' are just now being re-discovered as "Cool New Shit™" by those who chose - willingly - to ignore the very mechanics of the components their stacks are highly dependent on.
Still, I guess its not worth complaining. Its good to know that JS guys can get over the wall, and discover that we've all been using state machines for decades now, and so on, eventually. I just wish there was a lot less hubris on the "crowing about it" side of things. Honestly, JS guys: you should know a little C. Its still there, underneath all the cool shit, and you're still heavily, heavily dependent on it, no matter what your "npm up" tells you...
And it was right, to the argument is moot. VB was a very productive language. Any issues where with the ecosystem moving on, not with VB (which had its warts, but all languages do, C first of all).
>Oh, how the hoipolloi cried and crowed for the death of C developers back then. Oh, how they were wrong, oh so wrong!
Again, they were right, oh so right. We do 1000x the programming we did in 1980 and 1990, but we don't use 1000x more C programmers (or assembly or pascal, two other popular choices at the time). Tons of code that used to be that, is now written in higher level languages.
Which is kind of true for us on Windows.
Most of the C has been replaced by C++, to the point that even the new C runtime library is actually written in C++ with extern "C" entry points.
Also for those of us on Android, where using the NDK is an exercise in patience writing JNI boilerplate, because Google doesn't want us using it more than strictly necessary.
Oh and the two most beloved open source C compilers (gcc and clang) are actually written in C++.
Now I admit that on traditional UNIX systems and embedded development on hardware constrained systems, getting rid of C is an impossible task.
As a person who works as a front-end developer but after hours writes almost exclusively in Rust I think I could shed some light on what's going on here:
Since JS is so accessible a lot of the folks who work with it don't even have a formal education in Computer Science(like the author, who's a CS student), so many of them never touched a compiled language in their life, not to mention subjects regarding CS.
To these people most of the concepts in C(like manual memory management) are entirely foreign. It's not that they don't _like_ C, it's that they're utterly unaware of the mindset one has to have to write things in it.
EDIT: grammar.
I have yet to see a job posting for a fresh-off-the-boat C developer. It's nearly always 5-10 years industry-related experience required. Web, on the other hand, seems more willing to take on the new guys.
Certainly, as a higher level programmer, I do think it is great to know as much lower level concepts as possible (it helps your higher level programming skills). But the truth is, business simply wants to Get Shit Done Fast. And having frameworks or libraries do a lot of the work for you saves a lot of time. Hence the huge amount of usage of "glorified plumbing" in the field.
(I don't think even C++ folks are immune to the "glorified plumbing" effect, eg: they have Boost, Poco, QT, etc.)
As far as I know, the separation between this side of programming and the more mathematical / inner detail "engineering" oriented side has always existed. (When I went to college, the "higher programming" pathway also had business courses, where the "engineering" side concentrated more on algorithms and the like. Now, even the business programmer folks did take one course in C++ back then...)
It's a trade off, you're either cut and paste blue collar programmer, piping stuff together and watching for leaks, or your a hacker/engineer guy, doing CS.