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Comment by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | Hacker News Reader

But if the dy/dx gradient is that experts can develop faster in safe languages, and novices make fewer mistakes in safe languages, then C isn't useful day-to-day.

It occupies an ever-shrinking ecological niche on the Pareto frontier.

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Some of the worst software I've ever used, and also some of the worst software I've ever seen developed, was done by novices in safe languages. You can't escape how the computer works, you can only plug your ears and yell "LALALALALA!" really loud. But that doesn't change reality. If you aren't a good developer, you won't make good software, in any language. That's not the language's fault. If you don't understand pointers, that's on you. Computers use indirection; it's a fact of the craft. It doesn't matter if your fancy runtime hides them from you, they're still in there, and you should know how they work; not only because they're simply important, but because they'll make it easier for you to reason about things when something goes wrong. Otherwise, you'll sit there helpless and come running to someone like me with screenshots of stack traces that tell you exactly what's wrong. (Yes, this happens to me all the time.)

What are you on about? C is more useful day-to-day than the vast majority of languages. Learning it is hardly a waste of time.

C is one of the worst designed programming languages still in use. It's a ridiculous, cruel joke on anyone looking to learn unless your actual goal is to learn what a programming language designed 70s computers looks like.

I think C is a simple well-designed systems language. It has some warts, but many of the things people complain about are matters of preference – or due to a lack of understanding of the problems that C is good at solving.

The only major challengers to C in the last 50 years are C++ and Rust. I think that’s a testament to the quality of the language.

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