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Comment by mamcx | Hacker News Reader

> Personally, I'm tired of people bitching about C ... There was no other choice in the 1970's.

This in fact prove the opposite. People not complain hard enough about how much terrible C/C++ are.

1970: That is more than 50 years of BEING WRONG.

Not really. For a long time C was a perfectly legitimate choice. The 'wrongs' of C have only really come to light with widespread usage of the Internet and the much higher focus on security. Back in the day people working with computers weren't necessarily doing so to make a quick buck, hose your system or to try to see if they could do damage. The bulk of the people working with computers was trying hard to produce something useful instead of to deconstruct that which was already there in a malicious way.

The parasites came long after C.

Even then, you have better options (main one: pascal).

P.D: My main gripe is not about why C was made how is made. Is that it STAY like that until now. It must have been deprecating dangerous stuff long ago...

I've used both. C over Pascal any day, warts included.

Disagree. Pascal was no more safe than C

Nope Pascal was never a real competitor to C. I have programmed serious software using both languages and I would never pick Pascal over C.

>That is more than 50 years of BEING WRONG.

"I'd like to write software for you, but I have to wait 20 years before there's a suitable language to be invented first."

Code written in C/C++ is running the world. Python/JavaScript/PHP/Java etc. are all thin layers on top of runtimes written in C/C++, running on operating systems written in C/C++, using drivers written in C/C++/Assembler. There is a reason for this. It didn’t happen by accident. C/C++ competed against thousands of alternative languages and won. We are only now starting to see any real competition (Rust maybe?) but there is a looooooong way to go before C/C++ doesn’t run the world.

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