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Comment by cannabis_sam | Hacker News Reader

I’m still amazed that we allow compilation of so obviously faulty programs.

It’s like you sent a 1kg package through the postal service, and then the recipient gets an envelope containing a piece of cardboard from the original packaging.. And everyone involved is somehow A-OK with all of this.

If your programming language silently converts between types (in any direction), just to accommodate the programmer, instead of them specifying what they actually want to compute, you simply have failed as a programming language designer.

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> you simply have failed as a programming language designer

That's some hubris. The C language is 49 years old. Dennis Ritchie made reasonable design decisions for the time he found himself in. I think we should be understanding of that, and the network effects that lead to large parts of the world's critical software infrastructure being implemented in C. I don't think he failed at anything.

I used to be a C developer. I know how easy it is shoot your foot off in C. I think that, arguably, as an industry we should think twice before building more big and/or critical systems in C. There are better tools now.

But we are where we are and it's important to understand how we got here. Castigating our predecessors as failures does them a disservice.

Though one should mention that most languages can evolve and overcome some of their problems, eg. see PHP which used to be objectively a shitty language and nowadays it is somewhat usable - C underwent basically no improvements in that ridiculous timeframe. So it is not against the original creator but everyone responsible for the language since then.

>The C language is 49 years old.

That’s my point, no shade on K&R though.

meanwhile, lisp.

age is orthogonal to good design.

As if I hate lisp…

I was just excusing K&R from the realization we have now in the 2020s, and I would obviously afford the same leniency to John McCarthy and lisp.

The thing is that in all those 49 years we could already have had a backwards-incompatible reshape of the language. Leaving old cruft behind would have brought immense improvements! I develop in C and C++ and think this would apply to both.

However with the painful experience that was the Python 2 to 3 debacle, it's clear to me that the only way to do such upgrade is with an all-in commitment. See Ruby: breaking compatibility hasn't ever been as discussed and polemic as in Python. You just upgrade and tell the world: here's the new version, and the old one will be supported for not a day further than 4 years.

People would complain but at the end of the day the world keeps turning. We could be already at C 3.0 and be much happier without all the old compatibility baggage that the language drags with it.

Maybe,

"Although we entertained occasional thoughts about implementing one of the major languages of the time like Fortran, PL/I, or Algol 68, such a project seemed hopelessly large for our resources: much simpler and smaller tools were called for. All these languages influenced our work, but it was more fun to do things on our own. "

https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html

> That's some hubris.

How?

Or have you, completely on your own, decided that my criticism of programming language design in the 2020s is somehow applicable to languages “literally” designed in the 1970s?

Why not go one step further and deny Alan Turing and Alonzo Church, and their achievements…?

It's funny because C compilers have warnings for these, but you have to explicitly enable them. Typically my stuff looks like: -Wall -Wextra -Wpedantic -Wformat=2 -Wstrict-aliasing=3 -Wstrict-overflow=3 -Wstack-usage=12500 -Wfloat-equal -Wcast-align -Wpointer-arith -Wchar-subscripts -Warray-bounds=2

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