C's Biggest Mistake on Hacker News

[Laeeth Isharc]

On Tuesday, 24 July 2018 at 00:41:54 UTC, RhyS wrote:
> On Monday, 23 July 2018 at 22:45:15 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> I've predicted before that what will kill C is managers and 
>> customers requiring memory safety because unsafeness costs 
>> them millions. The "just hire better programmers" will never 
>> work.
>
> I have yet to see a company Walter where higher ups will take 
> correct actions to resolve issues.

It might be that you are working for the wrong companies.  Half 
the companies in the world are below average and few are 
excellent.

> And most manager are not going to rock the boat and stick their 
> necks out. Not when they can simply blame issues on programmer 
> incompetence or "it has always been like that with programming 
> languages". I have yet to see managers really taking 
> responsibility beyond guiding the projects so they do not get 
> fired and hope to rack in bonuses. Issues can always be blamed 
> on the tools or programmers.

That's a good point, but the nice thing about not having dominant 
market share is it's easy to grow it.  You don't need to convince 
most managers.  Just a few more people who are on the edge 
already anyway.  Quality is better than quantity because the 
former concentrate power.

> And frankly, good luck convincing any company to convert 
> millions of C code into D code.

The point is with betterC you don't need to.

And on the other hand if you did, libclang would take quite a lot 
of the pain out once you did a bit of work upfront.  See DPP

> I am sorry to say but to succeed as a language beyond being a 
> small or hobby language it takes: Being established already or 
> having a big name to hype behind your "product".

I don't agree.  We are in a time of positive disruption when old 
heuristics break down.

All D has to do is to keep compounding its adoption and what 
average people think of D is completely irrelevant.  What's 
important is what the best people amongst those who are 
principals rather than agents think of D.  There's no point 
selling it to a committee, but who wants to deal with committees 
anyway - life is too short for that if one possibly has the 
choice.


> Its the same reason why PHP despite being a good language ( for 
> what it is )

!

, still keeps
> getting the exact same crude on forums.
>
> If i am honest, DasBetterC is a for me unreliable D product 
> because using specific D library function can be GC. Or 
> DasBetterC needs to be sold as C only, ever, forget about 
> everything else that is D ( library, packages, ... ). Until 
> everything is 100% GC free, your going to run into this. And 
> even when its 100% GC free, people have long memories.

Don't use it if you don't want to.  But making predictions is a 
tricky thing and mostly of not much value.  I think it's more 
interesting to be the change you wish to see in the world.