C a dying skill ?

[Linny]

Hi,
Came across this article in the ComputerWorld website which has
included C in the top ten dying languages.

The top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9020942

To quote from the article

<snip>
6. C programming
As the Web takes over, C languages are also becoming less relevant,
according to Padveen. "C++ and C Sharp are still alive and kicking,
but try to find a basic C-only programmer today, and you'll likely
find a guy that's unemployed and/or training for a new skill," he
says."
<snip>

I personally feel the authors have done very little research on
evaluating C to relegate it to a obsolete langauage.

Linvin

 

[Richard Heathfield]

Linny said:

Hi,
Came across this article in the ComputerWorld website which has
included C in the top ten dying languages.

If you can't at least /read/ C, you're cutting yourself off from the
huge amount of knowledge to be found in the literature, because so much
of it is expressed in C. And if you can't /write/ C, you're not going
to be a great deal of use in an embedded systems shop. Nor will you be
as employable to a Unix site as someone who /can/ write C.

Like all such lists, it seems to have been put together by someone whose
expertise rests not so much in what he's listing as in his ability to
make lists.

 

[blufox]

Hi,
Came across this article in the ComputerWorld website which has
included C in the top ten dying languages.

The top 10 dead (or dying) computer skillshttp://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBas...

To quote from the article

<snip>
6. C programming
As the Web takes over, C languages are also becoming less relevant,
according to Padveen. "C++ and C Sharp are still alive and kicking,
but try to find a basic C-only programmer today, and you'll likely
find a guy that's unemployed and/or training for a new skill," he
says."

The guy is either suffering from brain tumour/down's syndrome or is
severly mentally retarted.
Did he even program in C?

All crap stuff from some luser.
How about embedded world, go write programs in .NET or Java for it.
Kernels still use C.
And yes he doesn't find some basic C-only programmer because they are
not interested in being spotted by a braindead random article write
who has no knowledge of C.

huh...C is dead, utter nonsense.

And yes maybe he went to Redmond to figure out that they program their
OS in .NET and what not which is not *C*.

thanks

 

[Malcolm McLean]

Linny said:


If you can't at least /read/ C, you're cutting yourself off from the
huge amount of knowledge to be found in the literature, because so much
of it is expressed in C. And if you can't /write/ C, you're not going
to be a great deal of use in an embedded systems shop. Nor will you be
as employable to a Unix site as someone who /can/ write C.

Like all such lists, it seems to have been put together by someone whose
expertise rests not so much in what he's listing as in his ability to
make lists.

There's a bit of truth in it. If you just know C and no other language, and
you don't have any other skill, such as a knowledge of biochemistry, then
opportunities for employment will be limited.

However C is the default language for specifying algorithms. The Graphics
Gems series invited submissions in any language, and every single routine
submitted was in C.

There are way too many programming languages. I've got perl scripts, shell
scripts, C and C++, Fortran and Java programs, all of which do essentially
the same things - iterate over datasets in loops, move information from one
palce to another, and do a few arithemtical calculations. There's no real
reason they couldn't all be written in a common language, but C graphics
won't work on the website, I've legacy Fortran, C has no portable directory
operations so database hits are better in Perl, C++ is virtually gibberish
and there is no way I could inflict it on the non-IT background people, and
so on.

Then I've added to the mix with MinBasic and BASICdraw. So I suppose I am
just as responsible.

 

[Rui Maciel]

To quote from the article

<snip>
6. C programming
As the Web takes over, C languages are also becoming less relevant,
according to Padveen. "C++ and C Sharp are still alive and kicking,
but try to find a basic C-only programmer today, and you'll likely
find a guy that's unemployed and/or training for a new skill," he
says."
<snip>

The author is an idiot. First he tries to claim that C programming is a
dying computer skill but then the only thing that he tries to claim is
that, by his own account, C-only programmers are "unemployed and/or
training for a new skill". Heck, my area is not CS and, besides C, I have
learnt three other programming languages. Although I've been writing C
exclusively for about a year at my job, according to the author's metrics I
would've been included in the group supporting the claim that C is a dying
art.

Moreover, nowadays every CS graduate is not a C-only programmer. So,
according to the author's metrics, all CS graduates could be writing C code
for a living and that would still point out that C programming is a dying
art.

And let's not even delve into the "C languages" bit. The author is an idiot
from start to end.


Rui Maciel

 

[Keith Thompson]

The guy is either suffering from brain tumour/down's syndrome or is
severly mentally retarted.

[snip]

Surely you can find a way to say that he's wrong without being *quite*
so crude.

 

[Roland Pibinger]

Surely you can find a way to say that he's wrong without being *quite*
so crude.

Well, it's not even a 'guy' ...

 

[jacob navia]

Hi,
Came across this article in the ComputerWorld website which has
included C in the top ten dying languages.

The top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9020942

To quote from the article

<snip>
6. C programming
As the Web takes over, C languages are also becoming less relevant,
according to Padveen. "C++ and C Sharp are still alive and kicking,
but try to find a basic C-only programmer today, and you'll likely
find a guy that's unemployed and/or training for a new skill," he
says."
<snip>

I personally feel the authors have done very little research on
evaluating C to relegate it to a obsolete langauage.

Linvin

lcc-win32 has a sustained download rate of around 500/day.

Since at least 5 years. Not bad for a dead language.

 

[Chris Thomasson]

Hi,
Came across this article in the ComputerWorld website which has
included C in the top ten dying languages.

[...]

C is dying? Humm... Try to tell that to the LKML! lol. IMHO, C, C++ and
Assembly Language are the kings of the systems languages...

I hope that low-level systems languages like C never die out! What the heck
would we use to prototype new things in? Yikes!

:^0

 

[Serve Laurijssen]

Hi,
Came across this article in the ComputerWorld website which has
included C in the top ten dying languages.

The top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9020942

To quote from the article

<snip>
6. C programming
As the Web takes over, C languages are also becoming less relevant,
according to Padveen. "C++ and C Sharp are still alive and kicking,
but try to find a basic C-only programmer today, and you'll likely
find a guy that's unemployed and/or training for a new skill," he
says."
<snip>

I personally feel the authors have done very little research on
evaluating C to relegate it to a obsolete langauage.

I 100% agree on some of the other skills, but I think nearly every
programmer encounters C somewhere in his career. Literature, cross platform
libraries, unix/linux tools, hobbyists all use C as main language. Yeah, its
not smart to know just C and thats it and if you're only willing to take a
job where C is used then you could be unemployed for a while

 

[Johan Bengtsson]

And yes maybe he went to Redmond to figure out that they program their
OS in .NET and what not which is not *C*.

I actually think there is a lot in windows that is written in C, most of
what is executing in the kernel probably. Ok I have not actually checked
but I guess... The .NET platform is surely *not* written in .NET either...

 

[Malcolm McLean]

lcc-win32 has a sustained download rate of around 500/day.

Since at least 5 years. Not bad for a dead language.

That's very good.
How can I get such levels for BASICdraw?

 

[Jack Klein]

Hi,
Came across this article in the ComputerWorld website which has
included C in the top ten dying languages.

The top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9020942

To quote from the article

<snip>
6. C programming
As the Web takes over, C languages are also becoming less relevant,
according to Padveen. "C++ and C Sharp are still alive and kicking,
but try to find a basic C-only programmer today, and you'll likely
find a guy that's unemployed and/or training for a new skill," he
says."
<snip>

I personally feel the authors have done very little research on
evaluating C to relegate it to a obsolete langauage.

Linvin

I normally do not bother getting involved in this sot of pointless
debate, but I have seen the equivalent of this statement several
places lately, so what the heck...

Certain people, and certain publications (paper or electronic) have
certain audiences. There are a lot of such publications these days
aimed at the "IT" audience, and the "Web 2.0" audience.

It might actually be true for these groups that "C is a dead
language". At least at the levels they work at, generating AJAX to
provide many new security vulnerabilities.

On the other hand, both the clients and servers run on computers whose
operating systems are written almost entirely in C. They execute Java
and interpret Javascript in virtual machines and interpreters written
almost exclusively in C. The entire internet architecture runs on
switched and routers programmed almost exclusively in C.

Our good friends at ARM claim over 2,000,000,000 ARM cores shipped in
2006, in off-the-shelf microprocessors/microcontrollers and custom
ASICs. Virtually every one of them is programmed in C.

So indeed some the authors and readers of some publications may have a
world view that doesn't need C anymore. They are way up there in a
cloud of trendy and ever-changing tools. The tools they use today
(ruby on rails is hot right now), will all be extinct and replaced
with some other hot new trends in a few years.

And from there point of view, they might be right. C programming is
definitely a dying profession in the "IT" world.

But in the rest of the computer world, C has been, is, and probably
will be for quite some time to come, the main language of computing.

There are C implementations, although not all even close to
conforming, for everything from the smallest 8-bit microcontrollers to
the most advanced 64-bit processors. C applications range from the
tiniest embedded system with a few K octets of code space and RAM to
the largest operating systems in existence.

The "IT" world gets most of the publicity today, because that's where
all the venture capital and publicity are, but that it actually a very
small segment of all the computing that's done.

From another, and equally valid, point of view, C programming is
essentially all there is, and everything else is down in the noise
margin.

--
Jack Klein
Home: http://JK-Technology.Com
FAQs for
comp.lang.c http://c-faq.com/
comp.lang.c++ http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq-lite/
alt.comp.lang.learn.c-c++
http://www.club.cc.cmu.edu/~ajo/docs/FAQ-acllc.html

 

[August Karlstrom]

Johan Bengtsson skrev:

I actually think there is a lot in windows that is written in C, most of
what is executing in the kernel probably. Ok I have not actually checked

Of course not, what would you be looking for?

 

[Charlton Wilbur]

JK> Certain people, and certain publications (paper or electronic)
JK> have certain audiences. There are a lot of such publications
JK> these days aimed at the "IT" audience, and the "Web 2.0"
JK> audience.

I don't think that's it, at all.

Consider how many people were horrified to hear that C was a dead
language, and clicked on the link to read the article. Consider how
many ads there were on that page, and how much revenue the magazine
got from each ad for each impression.

"C, while not very visible to the Web 2.0 market, is still thriving in
the embedded space and the operating system development space," while
true, does not produce the same kind of ad-viewing traffic.

Charlton

 

[Chris Hills]

Hi,
Came across this article in the ComputerWorld website which has
included C in the top ten dying languages.

The top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&
articleId=9020942

To quote from the article

<snip>
6. C programming
As the Web takes over, C languages are also becoming less relevant,
according to Padveen. "C++ and C Sharp are still alive and kicking,
but try to find a basic C-only programmer today, and you'll likely
find a guy that's unemployed and/or training for a new skill," he
says."
<snip>

I personally feel the authors have done very little research on
evaluating C to relegate it to a obsolete langauage.

Linvin

Actually they are quite wrong.

Yes, C is dying for PC programming. C++, C# C++/CLI and Java have
taken over.


However C++ itself has been superseded by C#, C++/CLI and Java.

C on the other hand is alive and well in a much larger area of
programming than desktop. Ie the embedded, real-time and control
industries.

*ANYTHING* that has an led, a battery or indeed power "near" it probably
has an MCU it in (cars typically have 100 and 3 networks) these systems
are by and large programed in C ( some Ada and three people who use
Forth)

C is very far from dead outside the PC world but C++ is probably on the
way out due to MS moving to it's own languages of C# .Net and C++/CLI
which is NOT C++.

 

[stdazi]

he article

<snip>
6. C programming
As the Web takes over.......
<snip>

As the web takes over.. With all the applications (apache, mysql, PHP,
python) written in C...

 

[CBFalconer]

.... snip ...

Actually they are quite wrong.

Yes, C is dying for PC programming. C++, C# C++/CLI and Java
have taken over.

However C++ itself has been superseded by C#, C++/CLI and Java.

Nonsense. You are limiting yourself to the Windoze platform.

 

[Chris Hills]

Nonsense. You are limiting yourself to the Windoze platform.

A Lot of the C++ programmers seem to have moved on to the other
languages. You are correct that C# and C++/CLI are Windows. However off
the desktop C is still the major language.

This is why I think C++ will disappear long before C does. Anywhere
there is C+++ there are alternatives. However in most of the places
where c is used there is no practical alternative.

That said they are using C++ on the JSF