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Comment by antirez | Hacker News Reader

If you are part of development community, you also get to read other people's code, use libraries, and so forth. When I open a C file it can be written without care certain times, but C is so self-evident that it's hard to don't understand the code after some superficial reading.

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I think C is misleadingly easy: it's easy to reason about, say, a single function body since there's only so many things you can even write in C.

But when you start composing things together and juggling the lifetimes of various things, the complexity balloons and it becomes a lot harder to understand "spooky action at a distance"-type things. You might argue that with good structure and discipline it's still not difficult, but the assumptions are all implicit and you have to get into the mind of whoever wrote it in the first place to understand it. And I write a lot of C and still find it tricky when I have to go look at some random C codebase!

I agree, but what I said has very little to do with that. What you says means that poorly written code has unexpected bugs. But you understand what it does, easily.

If the bugs are unexpected then it's hard to understand what it does :-)

Isn't it more like, you understand the tiny portion of the source code easily, that fits on the screen/in your head?

> I write a lot of C and still find it tricky when I have to go look at some random C codebase

Absolutely. C Code is not necessarily easy to understand. Not at all.

But the C parts itself are? In C you seldom wonder what C does, you wonder what the C code does.

If you work like OP likes, single person projects, small enough to keep almost completely in your head, I can see how C is especially charming. You never wrangle with C, only with your own code.

Superficial reading will tell you absolutely nothing about the code the macro processor creates from the bytes you see.

> but C is so self-evident that it's hard to don't understand the code after some superficial reading

You do realise that C and C++ are among the languages (there is also Perl) having anual obfuscated writing contests, right?

Being self evident is certainly not something I associate with C code.

I believe that "self evidence" parent comment mentions is something that only comes from years upon years of learning all the pitfalls of writing C.

That sound like a challenge

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