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Comment by x0re4x | Hacker News Reader

I've heard C language was designed with the idea that the programmer knows what he is doing and the programming language shall not be standing in his way.

For me the cost of forsaking C would be not to experience 100% programming freedom/power (which comes with 100% responsibility). And yes, C also gives you the freedom to do any nonsense :)

I was always fascinated how little resources are needed to run C programs, here an example (not by me): https://github.com/barteksalsa/avr-tiny12-disco/blob/master/... ATTiny12 mikrocontroller with: 1 KiB program flash rom, 32 bytes of "ram", 3 level hardware stack

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The infamous quote goes

"The C language combines all the power of assembly language with all the ease-of-use of assembly language."

Do you have a specific example? I wrote programs in Z80, AVR, x86/amd64 and MIPS assembly. In my experience writing C is MUCH easier.

But C allows for just as much foot-shooting, thus the joke. (The quote is meant to be humorous)

> I've heard C language was designed with the idea that the programmer knows what he is doing and the programming language shall not be standing in his way.

It's also been said to have been developed with the idea that compilers for it should be really easy to write, so let's just not spec half the language. ;) Freedom comes as a consequence, not independently.

This is analogous to Unix commands assuming you meant what you said. 'rm /bin/bash' Ok boss, no questions, no confirmation prompt, done.

One of the first things I do on a new Unix login is alias the rm, cp and mv commands to -i so they prompt before clobbering files. I spend a lot of my day at a command prompt, but I like my guardrails.

... and just like aliasing commands you can place your own guardrails in C programs at places where you consider them necessary.

P.S.: alias the rm, cp and mv - that I do too, I think everyone had his 'rm -rf $stuff' moment (-_-)

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