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Comment by wwweston | Hacker News Reader

At my first web job circa 1996, our shopping cart product was mostly C, so I did web development in C for about two years.

I'm not sure that using C was the craziest thing about how we did things. Nobody really had an idea how to structure a web app, so it was more or less a dozen or so CGIs which read/wrote to flat files through custom-written dbm clone (woo, NoSQL in '96!). Lots of unsophisticated string munging.

Maybe if we'd had some better abstractions, it wouldn't have been as painful, but C code written to do a lot of ad hoc string cobbling is, in fact, a little crazy.

Despite this, the product pretty much worked and actually had a few hundred customers and a future.

(We even got looked at by Yahoo, but they bought some outfit named Viaweb instead.)

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During the years we worked on Viaweb I read a lot of job descriptions. A new competitor seemed to emerge out of the woodwork every month or so. The first thing I would do, after checking to see if they had a live online demo, was look at their job listings. After a couple years of this I could tell which companies to worry about and which not to. The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be a bit frightening-- that's starting to sound like a company where the technical side, at least, is run by real hackers. If I had ever seen a job posting looking for Lisp hackers, I would have been really worried.

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

That's using language choice as a proxy for developer talent. It's a proxy, not a real metric of the language itself.

I'd note that pg ultimately sold to Yahoo, who a) wrote a fair bit of C in house themselves and b) were severely trounced by a competitor that initially was primarily using C++ (Google).

I don't see it as a talent filter proxy. More of a "Does this company understand what it is getting into and therefore what it needs" proxy.

e.g. You run a skyscraper building company. If you see job ads for competitors with things like "must have excellent woodworking knowledge" you are probably less worried than those with "must have excellent metallurgy knowledge".

> I don't see it as a talent filter proxy.

That's fine. I was characterizing how pg was using it.

> Does this company understand what it is getting into and therefore what it needs?

I think it is actually a much poorer proxy for that. Maybe if they are a small company or don't have any engineers, that would make sense. As a company gets larger, job descriptions start to represent very small, specific parts of what a company does, and the internal context of the company often outweighs the importance of the external context that is visible to you.

As an example, when Facebook was still up and coming and had real competition, Facebook were the ones hiring C programmers, not their competitors... ;-)

Ah I considered the second bit in the historical context.

The poly-lingual software related company seems to be a more modern trend IMO. At the time PG is referring to I would have been very surprised to see that going on in the web industry.

> The poly-lingual software related company seems to be a more modern trend IMO. At the time PG is referring to I would have been very surprised to see that going on in the web industry.

Consider yourself surprised then. ;-)

Actually back in those days a lot of the web industry was just doing integration with existing systems, which means the tech stacks were as varied as those existing systems. Even when not, it was the wild west. You tended to have a lot of experimentation, false starts, and general insanity. Heck Apple had a really good run with a server-side Objective-C development framework! Impressive systems were built fairly easily with Perl (and later PHP), Smalltalk, C++, VBScript, Python, LISP, and then there was AOLServer stuff (TCL!), and that's ignoring some of the proprietary language developed specifically for the web... At any given company you'd probably find somewhere between 2 to 5 of those. Sure there might be a dominant language, but there'd be specific needs for people with skills in any of those languages.

There was one sign you could rely on to know a company was not on top of their tech stack: the gratuitous licensing of proprietary Java application servers. Open source, and in some cases even proprietary, servlet engines made a lot of sense for some places, and Java application servers could often make sense for enterprise solutions that needed to be dragged kicking and screaming into the web world, but all too often you'd see these companies paying tens of thousands in licensing fees for technical capabilities that not only were not of use for them, but _would actively hamper their efforts_.

I actually was a Java consultant at Sun during some of that era, and I often would arrive at client sites and feel an overwhelming need to smash my head against the wall until I forgot what I'd seen.

Google still does primarily use C++.

Google is so huge now, I'm not sure if that is really something that you can state unequivocally. The search engine and a lot of the plumbing that everything is built on top of is written primarily in C++, but there is a TON of both Java and Python code there (and that's not counting things like Go and specialized languages like the infamous Sawzall).

Back in the day (particularly before they started doing ads), almost everything was C++.

Not only that but the scale of Google drives decisions that may not make sense for the rest of us.

If you ever worked in the enterprise environment of Fortune 500 companies, they are actually quite understandable.

Only tools, one-offs, and small internal products at Google can use Python. In general, for production it is disallowed (with exception of YouTube). They learned with YouTube that Python doesn't scale well to hundreds or thousands of developers. Even Mondrian, the code review system started by Guido and written in python, was replaced by something more scalable.

> Only tools, one-offs, and small internal products at Google can use Python.

Also YouTube (you may have heard of it).

> with exception of YouTube

Oh, you have. ;-)

You didn't mention java though... there's a TON of stuff in Java at Google.

Yeah, I'd say Java and C++ are about equally prevalent at Google. A lot of the older products and core infra is still C++, and a ton of new stuff is Java (See: Android).

Given the choice C++ is way better than C, given that it allows to use higher level abstractions and replace all unsafe C heritage by library based safe constructs.

Of course, the best option would be to replace them by other languages with native compilers.

However at the level these languages are used, it will only happen when OS vendors push new languages for their OS.

So it will never happen in UNIX land or Mac OS X land.

In Windows land, Microsoft is pushing for C++ and C++/CX, maybe C# if they ever decide to offer a full native compiler, like the Bartok one.

The embedded market OS vendors are all about Ada, C and C++. A few do offer Basic, Pascal and Oberon, but are very small niche.

So there isn't any OS vendor left that would push new system programming languages for their OS.

For business programming, there are already plenty languages to chose from.

> Given the choice C++ is way better than C, given that it allows to use higher level abstractions and replace all unsafe C heritage by library based safe constructs.

You may have noticed that C++ is not always deemed universally better than C. What language are all the top web servers implemented in?

C has library based safe constructs as well, and C++ still has all of C unsafety. You just get to exercise those bugs at a higher level of abstraction.

> Of course, the best option would be to replace them by other languages with native compilers.

I think that is anything but clear. Certainly the option of doing so has been around. You just don't see a ton of big moves that worked out well.

> However at the level these languages are used, it will only happen when OS vendors push new languages for their OS.

Most OS's actually have a pretty small API footprint (Windows being the obvious outlier). If it were really just about the language bindings, it would not be a real impediment. A language runtime can abstract out the OS (as the C runtime does).

> So there isn't any OS vendor left that would push new system programming languages for their OS.

I'm going to claim this could well be a function of Darwinian forces.

> You may have noticed that C++ is not always deemed universally better than C. What language are all the top web servers implemented in?

Apache and nginx => C

Tomcat, Jetty => Java

IIS => C++/C#

> Most OS's actually have a pretty small API footprint (Windows being the obvious outlier). If it were really just about the language bindings, it would not be a real impediment. A language runtime can abstract out the OS (as the C runtime does).

If developers aren't forced to use it, then they won't use it, even if made available.

> I'm going to claim this could well be a function of Darwinian forces.

That is my hope, after all we only need a few generations of developers and then the issue is taken care of by itself.

> Apache and nginx => C > Tomcat, Jetty => Java

Okay, if you are going to throw in Tomcat & Jetty, you should also throw in the likes of lighttpd, mongrel2, etc., all of which are written in C. Pretty much all the load balancers/reverse proxies are written in C too. Hmm.... is it maybe possible that it isn't always better to use C++ instead of C?

> IIS => C++/C#

Yup, the one outlier no doubt owes about 0% of its success to its tech stack. In general, if you don't work at Google and want a C++ web server on anything other than Windows, you are looking at a C++ server framework that has an embedded HTTP stack (tntnet, Wt, etc.).

> If developers aren't forced to use it, then they won't use it, even if made available.

I know. I spend all my time watching them because if I don't they just start doing everything in assembly.

> That is my hope, after all we only need a few generations of developers and then the issue is taken care of by itself.

I think you missed my point. ;-)

> > Apache and nginx => C > Tomcat, Jetty => Java > Okay, if you are going to throw in Tomcat & Jetty, you should also throw in the likes of lighttpd, mongrel2, etc., all of which are written in C. Pretty much all the load balancers/reverse proxies are written in C too. Hmm.... is it maybe possible that it isn't always better to use C++ instead of C?

No, they were developed by open source Linux guys that only care about C in what concerns compiled languages.

C++ was always badly received by the Linux community, in contrast with commercial UNIXes.

> IIS => C++/C# > Yup, the one outlier no doubt owes about 0% of its success to its tech stack. In general, if you don't work at Google and want a C++ web server on anything other than Windows, you are looking at a C++ server framework that has an embedded HTTP stack (tntnet, Wt, etc.).

Yes, nothing like contributing to have more insecure servers around.

>> That is my hope, after all we only need a few generations of developers and then the issue is taken care of by itself.

> I think you missed my point. ;-)

I surely got your point, but it is not about Darwin of languages, rather of developers.

> No, they were developed by open source Linux guys that only care about C in what concerns compiled languages. > C++ was always badly received by the Linux community, in contrast with commercial UNIXes.

You mean like KDE, Firefox, OpenOffice, OpenCV, VLC, bitcoin... heck even gparted is a C++ app.

The kernel developers obviously have a bias against C++ (and they'd argue that it is a justified bias). User space is a different land.

> Yes, nothing like contributing to have more insecure servers around.

? Not sure your point here...

> I surely got your point, but it is not about Darwin of languages, rather of developers.

My point was about Darwinian forces applied to language or developers.

I was responding to your point about OS vendors not being left around. It would appear that, for whatever reason, going with something other than C or C++ for your base OS doesn't seem to result in good survival odds.

>> No, they were developed by open source Linux guys that only care about C in what concerns compiled languages. > C++ was always badly received by the Linux community, in contrast with commercial UNIXes.

>You mean like KDE, Firefox, OpenOffice, OpenCV, VLC, bitcoin... heck even gparted is a C++ app.

>The kernel developers obviously have a bias against C++ (and they'd argue that it is a justified bias). User space is a different land.

I use Linux since 1995, and was for some time a Gtkmm contributor in the early days.

I know how it feels to be a C++ developer in Linux land.

> I use Linux since 1995, and was for some time a Gtkmm contributor in the early days. > I know how it feels to be a C++ developer in Linux land.

The GNOME crowd was self selected to be a bunch of "C not C++" bigots. The KDE community was quite different (even if MOQ is an abomination ;-). The only community I can think of that would be more hostile to C++ is the kernel devs.

I don't think your experiences are accurately reflective of the larger community. Particularly as C++ has improved (really, pre-gcc 3.0 there wasn't a good C++ compiler, and pre-2000 hardly anybody understood RAII, so C++ was kind of a pain), the larger community's attitude has changed. You can see this reflected in the success of the Boost project.

Coming from Turbo Pascal background I tend to be very critic of unsafe by design nature of C and C++. Specially given my focus in compiler design during the university, which allowed me to have a broad focus and experience in many languages, the average HN crowd might not be aware of.

Having said this, I was already coding in C++ in MS-DOS around 1993 (Turbo C++) and only used plain C when forced to do so.

So I have been part of the C++ community since the early PC compilers were available, and experienced this C vs C++ for quite some years now.

The funny part is remember the performance complaints back then about C and C++, that nowadays people state in HN about languages trying to replace them.

Oh, and I really like Boost.

> C has library based safe constructs as well, and C++ still has all of C unsafety.

The problem C's lacking one of most important primitives - data structures.

Bugs in standard library happen pretty rarely, I guess. So, C++ users have most common data structures for free.

And when I open some C-based project's code the first thing I usually expect and see is some homegrown linked list and/or map implementations (of SIGSEGV fame). I know, there are tons of libraries that offer them, but in my experience of "hey, that server crashed, could you figure out what went wrong"-type tasks, they're very rarely used.

> And when I open some C-based project's code the first thing I usually expect and see is some homegrown linked list and/or map implementations (of SIGSEGV fame). I know, there are tons of libraries that offer them, but in my experience of "hey, that server crashed, could you figure out what went wrong"-type tasks, they're very rarely used.

Fortunately, C++ developers just always use the STL because it is considered the bastion of all that is good in collection classes:

http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/avoiding-game-crashes-relate... http://engineering.adap.tv/2012/03/29/why-we-use-c-without-u...

Don't get me wrong. I love C++ and use the STL by default, but it's all too rare that I look at a decent sized C++ project and see anything different from what you'd expect if the project were written in C.

I wonder if we will get a GTL a la guava :p

You mean like: https://code.google.com/p/cpp-btree/

Of course he would be worried, because at the time there was a total of 17 Lisp hackers in the world to go around ;)

You should have used lisp :p

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