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Comment by casion | Hacker News Reader

The OP said saws and hammers, and there are conferences on hand tools which largely focus on saws, hammers and hand planes.

If we want to be literal then I don't know of anything on _just_ saws and hammers, but in the quite adjacent space (one or two hand carpentry tools also a focus) - yes.

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Well yeah we do have general conferences on programming languages. But the point is we don't have a specific conference on C, like you wouldn't have a specific conference on a simple hammer.

But tech also has conferences on specific languages. Seems like a JS, C#, C++, Java, python, etc. conference could be analogous to hand tools for carpentry.

Exactly - and there isn’t one for C. That’s the whole point of the thread.

Comparing programming languages to a specific tool is not the right analogy. A programmer can specialize in C, no carpenter specializes in hammering.

John Henry specialized in hammering... He was a steel driving man!

But that's the insight people are bringing up in this thread - nobody specialises in C.

Lots of people learn and use C as an every day tool. I'm a Java and Ruby programmer - but I have to work with C as an ABI and an extension language. Python programmers have to work with C as an extension language. There are DB developers who use C.

I don't know anyone who describes themselves as a 'C programmer' like you would 'Ruby programmer'.

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