commit 873831bf00816fd8e4db5ca5ea72b54aa2391003
parent 7cc5efcad7545a6ab3879795d84ddeb9fc4f1c5d
Author: Sebastiano Tronto <sebastiano@tronto.net>
Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2023 21:52:16 +0200
Added blog post
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+# Why C?
+
+Love it or hate it,
+[C](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_(programming_language)) has
+consistently been one of the most popular languages for the last
+50 years or so. How did it become so popular? And why are people
+(like me!) still using it?
+
+## Quirky, flawed, and an enormous success
+
+I have recently read
+[this article](http://cm.bell-labs.co/who/dmr/chist.html)
+by Dennis Ritchie. Besides summarizing the history of the language,
+in this paper Ritchie also tries to answer our first question. He
+gives four reasons for C's success:
+
+### UNIX
+
+C was the system language of UNIX, and the popularity of UNIX in
+the 70's and 80's made C popular too. In other words, UNIX was the
+[killer app](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_application) of C.
+
+### Simplicity
+
+Ritchie phrases the simplicity of C in terms of how close it was to
+machine instructions while still being sufficiently abstract. This
+means that C compilers are easy to write, and the language could be
+ported easily to different systems.
+
+### Pragmatism
+
+C was designed with a concrete goal in mind, not as some kind of
+abstract, ideal programming language. It was always in touch with
+the "real world" and the needs of programmers.
+
+### Stability
+
+Despite some changes throughout the years, C has always remained
+remarkably stable and free of proprietary extensions.
+
+## Why did I choose C?
+
+In 2019 I began working on a
+[Rubik's cube solver](https://nissy.tronto.net).
+At the time I had basic or intermediate level knowledge of multiple
+programming languages, but I was not an expert of any of them. I
+considered many languages for this project, including C, C++, Java,
+Python and Rust - this last one I did not know at the time, but I
+have wanted to learn it since 2013 or so.
+
+In the end I picked C, and these were the main reasons:
+
+### Ubiquity
+
+Since my program was going to be relevant to a small nice of people
+who are not necessarily programmers, I wanted it to be as accessible
+as possible in terms of required infrastructure (compiler, libraries).
+Sure, I could provide *some* compiled executables, but not for all
+systems. It would be much easier if people could just type `make`
+or `./compile.sh`, and then run my program.
+
+C compilers are everywhere, while the same cannot be said of e.g. Rust.
+
+### Simplicity
+
+Since C is a simple language, knowing a bit of C means knowing quite
+a big portion of it, in contrast to, say, C++. For this reason C
+was the language I was more confident picking up to start a big
+project, despite having more experience with Java or C++ at the
+time.
+
+### Stability
+
+I don't like to re-learn my language every couple of years for a
+project that I am working on in my spare time. Backward-compatibility
+is a thing, but, as languages introduce more features, the preferred
+idiomatic way to do certain things changes, and old code starts to
+"smell" without any good reason.
+
+[RANT]
+
+*Python2 was killed and now a bunch of tiny programs (mostly
+[Project Euler](https://projecteuler.net) solutions that I have
+no reason to "port" do not run anymore :( I want my print statements
+back!*
+
+*It seems Java has a new way of doing GUIs every time I look at it.
+When I read my first Java book,
+[AWT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Window_Toolkit) was the
+standard. When I read a second book,
+[Swing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swing_(Java)) was all the rage.
+Then I went to university and they taught me
+[JavaFX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaFX).*
+
+[/RANT]
+
+### Performance
+
+I knew from the start that performance was going to be important
+for this project, not only from the algorithmic point of view but
+also from the low-level side of things. I needed manual memory
+management and little overhead. This ruled out Java and Python.
+
+## Conclusion (and memes)
+
+I think there are some interesting similarities between the reasons
+of C's success acoording to Ritchie and the reasons I picked it for
+my personal project. I don't consider myself a C expert, and I know
+even less about the other languages I talked about in this post,
+so take my opinion as it is.
+
+Instead of pretending to be more knowledgeable than I am and writing
+some clever and insightful conclusion for this post, here is a short
+list of memes and folklore about the C programming language.
+If you know more of them send me an email and I'll update the list!
+
+* [[YouTube, song] Program in C](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tas0O586t80)
+* [[YouTube, song] Write in C](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S1fISh-pag)
+* [[Text] Linus Torvalds on C vs C++](https://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus)
+* [[Wikipedia] Duff's device](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duff%27s_device)
