Even looking at simple code example, with casting from/to void, returning 0 as void etc, I cannot understand how people are calling C easy and productive language
I call that productive.
Further, you have the smallest API/ABI stdlib to work through the quirks of of any language. Again. Productive.
I, of course, take the precaution of allocating time to blow up 5/8 of a solar system/a star into my projects. I have a tendency to find ways to do things other than intended, and like to absorb the lessons.
As a result, I have quite the collection of ways not to do things, or how to do things other than I intended. Just because your management fu disagrees with my definition of productive is not my concern.
At least you're not getting reduced productivity from hn arguments online.
I think it's also students; I think some people are still taught C as their first programming language. If you go on r/C_programming on Reddit, a lot of it is filled by very basic questions from what seem like beginners; I suspect they're students trying to do their homework.
- People who work on projects which require low-level access, potentially mixing in assembly code (drivers, OS, etc), porting to different architectures, real-time, high-precision, control of timing, lack of MMU, etc
- People who want to perform specific actions, like a specific OS syscall, that may not be exposed [easily] by a higher level language in the way the programmer wants
- People who want to write very fast/efficient code
- Legacy code maintainers
Not too long ago I busted out some C to create a stripped binary for a job interview round. The interviewee needed to diagnose what the binary was doing and why and report back. Not all that common for most programmers today, but I expect a good amount of detail from a senior-level systems candidate.
Casting to/from `void *` isn't needed in C, and is commonly against coding conventions, like those used by the Linux kernel.
One would generally return `NULL` instead of `0` as `void *`.
But yes, it is possible to write some funky C code that could be technically correct but still not be considered good.
Brainfuck is a tiny language.
C++ is a gigantic language.
Language size and ease of use are not directly related.
As an example, Lisp has very small language size, and thus is less complex.