Comment by EliRivers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EliRivers | Hacker News Reader

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"Well, turns out C and in particular C++ development is going the way of the dodo"

That's not true. It's not remotely true. It's so untrue. C code is everywhere. It's in almost every OS I can think of, it's running my dishwasher, it's in my car, it's the standard language of almost every embedded platform I've ever worked on.

Let's take a look at the TIOBE index which, whilst very unscientific, would show up something going extinct as you suggest.

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

Hey look, there's C at the top, and there are C based languages in three of the top four places.

I suggest that you have fallen victim to a lack of perspective; maybe you don't use C and C++, and the people you work with don't (because if they did, you wouldn't be working with them), and you extrapolated that to the whole world. While you're coding in your frameworks and APIs, there is a vast industry you're not aware of using C and C++ that is not going to go away any time soon.

Another language popularity survey[1] puts c in the fifth place. It uses data on people who searched tutorials on a certain language, so this result do seem interesting.

Another interesting benchmark would be:lines of code written each year in each language, anybody knows such benchmark ?

[1]https://sites.google.com/site/pydatalog/pypl/PyPL-PopularitY...

In my experience C and C++ development are becoming more and more niche skills. Sure operating systems are written in those languages but I would call that a niche. And a small one at that. Then there is the embedded world, of course embedded systems are written in C or C++ either because of hardware constraints or real time requirements. Turns out however that even embedded systems are becoming so powerfull that C is no longer the only contender. Sure tiobe index claims that C is the king, but if you look at the job market you will quickly realise that C and C++ are not very sought after skills and are relatively low paid ones at that. Thats at least the case in my country, and has been so for many years.

Fair enough. In my personal experience, C is the big coding skill looked for, but I mostly work for defence companies and major manufacturers. If you don't look at job listings for that sort of company, or your country simply doesn't have those industries in significant size, you'll see something else. I regularly see skilled embedded coders being poached with ridiculous pay rises because they're so useful and so hard to get (40 or 50 percent increase in salary upon being poached/headhunted isn't uncommon for someone a few years out of university who spent those few years learning how to code for embedded systems, but that's usually being poached between defence companies and major appliance makers - Lockheed, Thales, Honeywell, that kind of thing).

H didn't imply that its dead, he was implying that its dying. Slowly. In my opinion, 30 years from now C will no longer be in the top 10. It'll still be around though, because there will still be uses for it. Just not as many uses as before.

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