also I just realized that Brazil did NOT make a programming language entirely in Spanish and call it “Si” and that my professor was making a joke about C… god damn it
this post is probably too nieche but I feel like Lemmy is nerdy enough that enough people will get it lol
Why would Brazil choose Spanish?
Brazil is a known Mexican Country, obviously they speak Spanish
Ridiculous. They’re in Latin America, so they speak Latin.
Ego puto in orto meo
Cuz Brazil speaks Spanish, duh. Not every country has English as their language, dummy
good ragebait 👌
Beigerate: kinda boring, but not bad.
But don’t they use Portuguese?
What’s that? There’s English, French (aka weirdo Canadian), German (aka hate speech), Spanish (aka Mexican) and China
What are you on about?
C is the old carpenter, who can drive in nails with three strikes of the hammer and never forgets his tools.
C# is his friend who just uses power tools instead. He is fine too. He goes home early whenever he can.
Python is the new guy at work who thinks he’s super smart. He actually can do the job really well, but for some reason nobody likes him all that much.
Javascript is the boss’s son who got the job since he agreed to stay off pills but he does not. He is useful to be friendly with, maybe, but avoid him any day that you can. Typescript is his weird fiancée. She is significantly less stupid but much more rarely useful, and also best avoided.
Go and Rust are tight-knit friends who get shit done. They are extremely capable but also not friendly, they tend not to talk much.
Clojure does mushrooms on weekends, and seems to believe he has key insights the rest of the crew is too dim to understand, but he also makes frequent simple mistakes on the job and forgets things. Also avoid.
Java only has the job because he’s known the boss since they were kids. He was never that good, but now he is old, and frequently drunk. Avoid at all costs.
COBOL handles the books because no one else can understand the system and it’s too much work to change after 40 years
Rust is that one rare type of guy who refuses to round measurements so you end up with “the drawer is 28.34646 inches tall.”
Clojure one is perfect lmao.
Nah java’s the super chatty guy who goes on and on and on and never aguts the hell up, making doing anything with him extra tedious
C is the old carpenter with leaky memory with heavy undiagnosed autism, who constantly cracks demented jokes like “Missing } at end of file”.
He’s so mentally not there in fact, that if you don’t specifically tell him to return to you after finishing the job, he will neither figure out what he’s supposed to do, nor will he tell you what went wrong, but instead he will happily jump somewhere else, halucinate commands from the structure of the walls and start doing whatever the voices tell him to do.
In my analogy, the tool is the programming language, and the worker is the programmer in that language. Mostly.
In your analogy, only C and C# mention using specific tools, unless you count mushrooms as tools ;)
Yeah and the new guy takes 3 days to finish the job that the old carpenter can do in 2hrs. And when he wants it done faster he quickly asks the old guy to do it for him. That’s why nobody else in the site likes him.
Python is from 1991. The only older language you listed was c.
Python is a millenial. He’s 34, is married and has two kids. But the old guys still think he’s 15.
Brazil did NOT make a programming language entirely in Spanish
Because we speak fucking portuguese
I’ve met more than one that thinks you speak Mexican
Maybe if we start saying Americans speak Americanese they’ll get the memo lmao
I suspect they might get proud of that, “we made english american!”
I fear not so. To them everything outside of the USA is the same thing.
If we’re continuing this analogy, did python or js take more drugs?
Don’t let Java try hallucinogens. It will get lost in the
public static void.Python’s on edibles. JS is on a cocktail of every psychedelic known to man and has been continuously since 1995.
I’ll be honest, I think modern python is cool. You just need to accept that it has some limitations by design, but they mostly makes sense for its purpose.
It’s true that the type system is optional, but it gets more and more expressive with every version, it’s honestly quite cool. I wish Pylance were a bit smarter though, it sometimes fails to infer sum types in if-else statements.
After a couple large-ish personal projects I have concluded that the problem of python isn’t the language, but the users.
On the other hand, C’s design is barren. Sure, it works, it does the thing, it gives you very low level control. But there is nothing of note in the design, if not some quirks of the specifications. Being devoid of innovation is its strength and weakness.
As someone who studied C exclusively in school and used it for the majority of programming projects I had in the real world, coming to Python now is like moving from a kit car like a Caterham to a Mercedes S class.
Knowing nothing about code but a fair bit about cars, does that analogy mean like, you can play around with a kit car all you want because you built it, it’s relatively simple, and if you break it you’ll know why and how to fix it, and the Mercedes being the exact opposite?
I think it’s not about using it, not the mechanics of using it. No putting together required. And you have everything you need to start driving it the moment you get the keys.
I’m not a mechanic or a programmer so I’m also curious what the meant lol
C does one thing really well and that’s everything fast with complete control. Python is cool for people just trying to bang out some scripts or learning to program but interpreted languages have no place in mainstream software. Devices are starting to become slower than computers 30 years ago because there is so much garbage being included in apps written in interpreted java and Python and other nonsense. It’s not just bad for the user but it’s bad for the planet. It shouldn’t take a million times the energy to run a simple program because someone doesn’t know how to write in a proper language. Python is okay for some things. The world has become too reliant on it though. Also just for purely selfish reasons if you are the type. Interpreted languages kill your battery life and ram and stuff. Modern android phones besides all their problems with Google ruining them like Microsoft are also just becoming incredibly slow and stupid. You can barely even open two apps without most android phones panicking and closing apps to save memory. A calculator app is 100 MBs now. The phone feels like it’s going to catch on fire when you open a notepad.
I like many of your points, but your comment is facetious.
You said it yourself, “it’s good for someone trying to bang out scripts”… and that’s it, that’s the main point, that’s the purpose of python. I will argue over my dead body that python is a trillion times better than sh/bash/zsh/fish/bat/powershell/whatever for writing scripts in all aspects except availability and if that’s a concern, the only options are the old Unix shell and bat (even with powershell you never know if you are stuck ps 5 or can use ps 7).
I have a python script running 24/7 on a raspberry that listens on some mqtt topics and reacts accordingly asynchronously. It uses like 15kiB (literally less than 4 pages) of ram mostly for the interpreter, and it’s plenty responsive. It uses about two minutes of CPU time a day. I could have written it in rust or go, I know enough of both to do it, it would have been faster and more efficient, but it would have taken three times the time to write, and it would have been a bitch to modify, I could have done it in C and it would have been even worse. For that little extra efficiency it makes no sense.
You argue it has no place in mainstream software, but that’s not really a matter of python, more a matter of bad software engineers. Ok, cool that you recognise the issue, but I’d rather you went after the million people shipping a full browser in every GUI application, than to the guys wasting 10 kiB of your ram to run python. And even in that case, it’s not an issue of JavaScript, but an issue of bad practices.
P.S. “does one thing well” is a smokescreen to hide doing less stuff, you shouldn’t base your whole design philosophy on a quote from the 70s. That is the kind of shit SystemD hater shout, while running a display server that also manages input, opengl, a widget toolkit, remote desktop, and the entire printer stack. The more a high profile tool does, the less your janky glue code scripts need to do.
Python is okay for some things. It’s just that software in general has become terrible because there is so much wasted power being used because people have access to fast hardware. In the 90s your entire environment would use a few MBs of ram. I know with high res images some of this stuff would increase but people are so wasteful with how they write stuff these days. We are evolving backwards because we spend hundreds or thousands on amazing hardware only to have it run like trash in a world where everything is written in java and python and electron. No longer do developers optimize. They just get their webpage to run at a inconsistent 30 FPS on your $2000 computer, and collect their 150k salary, on a machine that has more computing power than every computer in the world put together in the 90s.
It’s not just bad for your time and sanity. It’s bad for the environment, it’s bad for the economy, this same rot is working it’s way into operating systems, into game engines. Every game written for UE5 seems to run at 50 FPS regardless of how good your PC hardware is because of these same low quality programmers and terrible tools. Idk Linux to me has been a breath of fresh air in recent times as bad as it can be. It’s mostly C code with tiny binaries that are like 1-3 MB usually. I guess there is a silver lining to it in that all of these evil corporations like Google and meta and apple are dying because of this. Maybe the internet will go back to being centered around user content in a distributed fashion and not just a couple of highly controlled websites that try to brainwash you into supporting your corporate backed government. It already seems like every triple A game studio sucks and all the best games that have come out in the past 15 years have been from small indie studios.
Have you heard of the term “Software crisis”?
We don’t really talk all that much about it any more, because it’s become so normal, but the software crisis was the point where computers became faster than human programmers. That problem came up in the 1960.
Up until then a computer was simple enough that a single human being could actually understand everything that happened under the hood and could write near-optimal code by hand.
Since then computers doubled in performance and memory every few years, while developers have largely stayed human with human performance. It’s impossible for a single human being to understand everything that happens inside a computer.
That’s why ever since we have tried optimizing for developer time over execution time.
We have been using higher-level languages, frameworks, middlewares and so on to cut the time it takes to develop stuff.
I mean, sure, we could develop like in the 90s, the tools are all still there, but neither management nor customers would accept that, for multiple reasons:
- Everyone wants flashy, pretty, animated things. That takes an ungodly amount of performance and work. Nobody is ok with just simple flat unanimated stuff, let alone text-based tools.
- Stuff needs to run on all sorts of devices: ARM smartphones, ARM/x86 tablets, ARM/x86 PCs, all supporting various versions of Windows, Mac, Android, iOS and preferrably also Linux. But we also need a web version, at best running on Chrome, Firefox and Safari. You could develop all of these apps natively, but then you’d need roughly 20 apps, all of them developed natively by dedicated experts. Or you develop the app on top of browsers/electron and have a single app.
- Stuff needs to work. Win95-level garbage software is not ok any more. If you remember Win95/98 fondly, I urge you to boot it up in a virtual machine some time. That shit is unacceptably buggy. Every time the OS crashes (which happens all the time) you are playing russian roulette with your partition.
- Did I mention that everything needs to be free? Nobody wants to pay for software any more. Win95 was $199 ($432 in 2025 money) and Office was $499 ($1061 in 2025 money). Would you pay 1.5k just for Win11 and the current office?
So there’s more and more to do with less and less time and money.
We can square that circle by either reducing software quality into nothingness, or by using higher-level developer tools, that allow for faster and less error-prone develoment while utilizing the performance that still grows exponentially.
What would you choose?
But ultimately, it’s still the customer’s choice. You don’t have to use VSCode (which runs on Electron). You can still use KATE. You don’t have to use Windows or Gnome or MacOS. You can use Linux and run something like IceWM on it. You don’t have to use the newest MS Office, you can use Office 2013 or Libre Office.
For pretty much any Electron app out there, there’s a native alternative.
But it’s likely you don’t use them. Why is that? Do you actually prefer the flashy, pretty, newer alternative, that looks and feels better?
And maybe question why it feels so hard to pay €5 for a mobile app, and why you choose the free option over the paid one.
I actually pay for software but I run Linux, I’m not paying for windows because it’s bad. I prefer to pay then have ads. I value my time.
What you are saying is somewhat true. There are hundreds of thousands of programmers these days if not millions. The quality of the person who writes software just isn’t what it used to be. Not that they don’t work hard, but just that they aren’t capable of writing C.
You also can understand everything in a system, at least some people can. I understand those people are rare and expensive to hire.
One thing C really lacks is modern libraries to do these things. It’s not a limitation of C itself it’s just that most modern tools are targeted towards other languages. I understand that writing webapps in C isn’t the best idea because you don’t want web stuff running on hardware directly most of the time if you care about security anyways, but it’s really just a trend where the industry moved away from C with all of its frameworks and stuff which has not been good for the users.
Windows 98 was really good if you knew how it worked. I never had any issues really with stuff like XP. It always worked, it was always fast, it was always stable. I used XP for probably 10 years and never had any issues with instability and stuff and I was constantly modifying stuff, overclocking, patching drivers, modding bios, doing weird stuff that others didn’t do coming up with my own solutions. It worked really well. It’s modern windows that’s a buggy mess that crashes all the time.
To get back to the other point though, to move away from C was a mistake. It’s not that much more complicated than using other languages. Most of the complexity was just in setting up the environment which was admittedly terrible under C. Trying to link libraries and stuff. The actual code itself is not really that much more difficult than say python, but it’s a different paradigm. You are getting closer to the hardware, and it’s not automatic that your code is going to be cross platform unless you use platform agnostic libraries. It’s entirely possible to write multiplatform code in C and most programs could be written in a multiplatform way if users use libraries that target multiplatform development and let users compile them ahead of time. It’s just that companies like Microsoft created proprietary junk like .net and direct X which made writing multiplatform code much harder if you didn’t start with libraries like qt or gtk, and openGL. Again, this was never a fault of C. You could even have a standard in CPUs that would run any code to bootstrap a compiler and you could have platform agnostic binaries, which is just something that never happened because there was not really a point to it since so much code was written in lockdown .net and directx.
Interpreted language were intended to solve those issues. Making platform agnostic code, and to make code that was safe to run from websites without compromising the integrity of the users root filesystem, but these are terrible solutions. Especially as interpreted languages moved beyond web stuff and small simple apps to being used everywhere and integrated into every part of the system.
Python is a scripting language. It’s best used to call C libraries or to write very lightweight apps that don’t depend on low level hardware access. Java is like C but worse. JavaScript is like the worst of all worlds, strongly typed, verbose, picky about syntax, slow, interpreted, insecure, bloated, but it is cross platform which was originally probably why it was so popular. That should have just been added to C however. When you have code that runs 10x-10,000 times slower and you have bad programmers who don’t know how to write code that doesn’t destroy the bus, or use 100% of your system resources for no benefit, you end up in this mess we have today, for every app that uses 100% of your memory bandwidth, that halves the speed of the next program. If you have 3 programs running that peg then Emory bus, that means your next program is going to run at 0.25 the speed roughly. This is not how software should be written.
Python can also be great for prototyping algorithms and stuff, automating things that run once, not in loops. However once you figure it out, it should be written in C. All of these libraries that are written for the modern web should have been written to target C.
The cool thing about C is you can use it like basic if you really want. With a bit more syntax, but you don’t have to use it with classes. You can just allocate memory on stack and heap and then delete all of it with like one class if you really want to. Everything that’s cool about other languages mostly just already exists in C.
It’s kind of amazing to see the difference between a Linux smartphone and an android smartphone these days. A Linux smartphone running terrible hardware by today’s standard is just instant. 32 GBs of storage is enough to add everything you want to the operating systems because binaries are like 2 MB. Then that all goes away as soon as you open a web browser. A single website just kills it. Then you sit down on a modern windows machine and everything is slow and buggy as shit. It draws 500w of power on a 2nm process node. It’s a real issue. No amount of computer power will ever overcome interpreted languages because people will always do the minimum possible work to get it to run at an unstable 30 FPS and call it good.
You also can understand everything in a system, at least some people can. I understand those people are rare and expensive to hire.
No. No, you seriously can’t, not even if you are deploying to one single PC. Your code includes libraries and frameworks. With some studying, you might be able to familiarize yourself to the point where you know every single flow through the frameworks and libraries down to each line that’s being executed. Then it goes through the compiler. Compiler building is an art unto itself. Maybe there are a handful of people who understand everything GCC does in the roughly 200MB of its source code. But lets say you are a super crack programmer, who can memorize source code with about as many characters as 42x all of the Harry Potter books.
Now your code gets executed by the OS. If you are on Windows: Sucks to be you, because it’s all closed source. All you can manage to understand is the documentation, unless you decompile all of Windows. If you are on Linux you at least have the source code. That’s only 300MB of source code, shouldn’t be hard to completely understand everything in there and keep it in memory, right? And you aren’t running your code directly on the bare Linux kernel, so please memorize everything your DE and other relevant components do.
But we aren’t done yet, we are just through the software part. Hardware is important too, since it might or might not implement everything exactly like in the documentation. So break out your hex editor and reverse-engineer the latest microcode update, to figure out how your CPU translates your x64 calls to whatever architecture your CPU uses internally. An architecture that, btw, doesn’t have any public documentation at all. Might be time to break out the old electron microscope and figure out what the 20 billion transistors are doing on your CPU.
Now we are done, right? Wrong. The CPU is only one component in your system. Now figure out how all other components work. Did you know that both your GPU and your network interface controller are running full embedded operating systems inside them? None of that is publicly documented or open source, so back to the electron microscope and reading binary code in encrypted update files.
If you think all this knowledge fits into a single human’s brain in a way that this human actually knows what all of these components do in any given circumstance, then I don’t really know what to say here.
It’s not a matter of skill. It’s just plain impossible. It is likely easier to memorize every book ever written.
One thing C really lacks is modern libraries to do these things. It’s not a limitation of C itself it’s just that most modern tools are targeted towards other languages. I understand that writing webapps in C isn’t the best idea because you don’t want web stuff running on hardware directly most of the time if you care about security anyways, but it’s really just a trend where the industry moved away from C with all of its frameworks and stuff which has not been good for the users.
You can write webapps in C using Webassembly. Nobody does it because it takes much more time and has basically no upsides.
Windows 98 was really good if you knew how it worked. I never had any issues really with stuff like XP. It always worked, it was always fast, it was always stable. I used XP for probably 10 years and never had any issues with instability and stuff and I was constantly modifying stuff, overclocking, patching drivers, modding bios, doing weird stuff that others didn’t do coming up with my own solutions. It worked really well. It’s modern windows that’s a buggy mess that crashes all the time.
I would recommend that you revisit these old OSes if you think that. Fire it up in a VM and use it for a few weeks or so. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. I did run Win98 for a while to emulate games, and believe me, your memory doesn’t reflect reality.
Reading what you are writing about programming, may I ask about your experience? It sounds to me like you dabbled in a bit of hobby coding a while ago, is that right?
Because your assessments don’t really make much sense otherwise.
To get back to the other point though, to move away from C was a mistake. It’s not that much more complicated than using other languages. Most of the complexity was just in setting up the environment which was admittedly terrible under C. Trying to link libraries and stuff. The actual code itself is not really that much more difficult than say python, but it’s a different paradigm.
No, the problem was not setting up the environment. The main problem with C is that it doesn’t do memory management for you and thus you constantly have to deal with stuff like buffer overflows, memory management issues, memory leaks, pointer overflows and so on. If you try to write past a buffer in any modern language, either the compiler or the runtime will catch it and throw an error. You cannot write past e.g. the length of an array Java, Python or any other higher-level language like that. C/C++ will happily let you write straight across the stack or heap, no questions asked. This leads to C programs being incredibly vulnerable to fitting attacks or instabilities. That’s the main issue with C/C++.
and it’s not automatic that your code is going to be cross platform unless you use platform agnostic libraries. It’s entirely possible to write multiplatform code in C and most programs could be written in a multiplatform way if users use libraries that target multiplatform development and let users compile them ahead of time.
C is just as much “inherently multiplatform” as Python: Use pure C/Python without dependencies and your code is perfectly multi-platform. Include platform-specific dependencies and you are tied to a platform that supplies these dependencies. Simple as that. Same thing for every other language that isn’t specifically tied to a platform.
You could even have a standard in CPUs that would run any code to bootstrap a compiler and you could have platform agnostic binaries, which is just something that never happened because there was not really a point to it since so much code was written in lockdown .net and directx.
That standard exists, it’s called LLVM, and there are alternatives to that too. And there are enough platform agnostic binaries and stuff, but if you want to do platform-specific things (e.g. use a GPU or networking or threads or anything hardware- or OS-dependant) you need to do platform-specific stuff.
Python is a scripting language. It’s best used to call C libraries or to write very lightweight apps that don’t depend on low level hardware access. Java is like C but worse. JavaScript is like the worst of all worlds, strongly typed, verbose, picky about syntax, slow, interpreted, insecure, bloated, but it is cross platform which was originally probably why it was so popular. That should have just been added to C however. When you have code that runs 10x-10,000 times slower and you have bad programmers who don’t know how to write code that doesn’t destroy the bus, or use 100% of your system resources for no benefit, you end up in this mess we have today, for every app that uses 100% of your memory bandwidth, that halves the speed of the next program. If you have 3 programs running that peg then Emory bus, that means your next program is going to run at 0.25 the speed roughly. This is not how software should be written.
I don’t even know what kind of bus you are talking about. Emory bus is a bus line in Atlanta.
If you are talking about the PCIe bus, no worries, your python code is not hogging the PCIe bus or any other bus for that matter. It’s hard to even reply to this paragraph, since pretty much no single statement in there is based in fact.
The cool thing about C is you can use it like basic if you really want. With a bit more syntax, but you don’t have to use it with classes. You can just allocate memory on stack and heap and then delete all of it with like one class if you really want to. Everything that’s cool about other languages mostly just already exists in C.
You cannot use C with classes. That’s C++. C doesn’t have classes.
It’s kind of amazing to see the difference between a Linux smartphone and an android smartphone these days. A Linux smartphone running terrible hardware by today’s standard is just instant. 32 GBs of storage is enough to add everything you want to the operating systems because binaries are like 2 MB. Then that all goes away as soon as you open a web browser. A single website just kills it.
Hmm, nope. Linux smartphones run fast because they have no apps. Do a factory reset on your Android phone and disable all pre-installed apps. No matter what phone it is, it will run perfectly fast.
But if you run tons of apps with background processes, it will take performance.
Then you sit down on a modern windows machine and everything is slow and buggy as shit. It draws 500w of power on a 2nm process node. It’s a real issue. No amount of computer power will ever overcome interpreted languages because people will always do the minimum possible work to get it to run at an unstable 30 FPS and call it good.
I use Linux as my main OS, but I have Windows as a dual-boot system for rare cases. My PC draws 5w in idle on Windows or on Linux. The 500w what your PSU is rated for, or maybe what the PC can draw in full load with the GPU running at full speed (e.g. if you play a photo-realistic game), not what is used when the PC idles or just has a few hundred tabs in the browser open.
I’m on mobile so it’s hard to memorize all the things you wrote. Maybe I’ll clarify a few points that bothered me. You are obviously very knowledgeable in these things, even more than me in many areas. I am a hobbies not professional programmer but I have been programming since I was 12 or so and I’m in my 30s now, and also have always been a white hat hacker.
I don’t mean you can literally understand everything about a computer, just that you can understand everything you need to in order to do 99% of things and this isn’t some crazy thing. You would obviously use openGL or vulkan or direct X to access the GPU instead of writing binaries.
Modern machines do use several hundred watts just doing regular things. Not idle sure I less you have tons of junk running in the background, but even basic tasks on modern machines which utilize code written in languages like Python and Java and electron and web stuff, will absolutely use much of your systems hardware for simple tasks.
Managing memory in C++ is easy but you have to not be stupid. C++ isn’t stupid proof. It’s also not a good fit for some things because people make mistakes or just take advantage of the fact that C is low level and has direct access to exploit things. The issue is really that if you aren’t on a certain level of programming then c++ can be really unsafe. You need to understand concepts like creating your own node graph with inheritance to make managing memory easy. It is easy once you understand these things. Garbage collectors are not a good solution for many things. I would argue most things. It’s easy sure, but also buggy and breaks the idea of just having smooth running software. You should be freeing your memory just as you called it in an organized and thoughtful way.
By memory bus I mean the front side bus, which if you have programs running at uncapped speeds is bad or just programs running with 100x the overhead that they would have if written in C. Again this is just basic knowledge that any programmer should know without even being taught really. There is no reason to have programs bottleneck your machine when we live in an era of multitasking.
Writing code for C++ also doesn’t take longer after like 5 minutes, it’s actually much quicker because you can just write it and not have it complain about indentation or anything. It is a bit verbose with brackets and stuff but these are there to facilitate having a powerful language that can do pretty much anything. There is also string libraries and stuff that handle strings without the security issues.
Linux also is tiny without being devoid of software. It’s because it’s written in C and stuff is only as large as it needs to be. My entire Linux OS for my phone with all its files that I’m working on is less then 10 GBs and it has emulators, many libraries, many applications, several web browsers, wine, virtual machines, servers, several different development environments, different window managers, and all kinds of other stuff. On android installing a web browser could take hundreds of MBs for essentially zero benefit.
No benefits to web assembly? I guess to you that may be true because you don’t care about optimization, download size, energy use and stuff like this. It does have benefits, because one not everyone has thousands to upgrade their computer every two years, and where I live in a Republican state in America, the internet maxes out at 200 KBps, and on a good day maybe 500 KBs.
The first step on fixing a problem is admitting you have a problem. Software is only going to get worse if devs are in denial about it.
For us ludite lurkers who couldn’t figure it out from context alone, which one is the interpreted language? I got lost on that detail lol
Uses less memory until it inevitably springs a memory leak. And its not a million times the memory, its ~10x. You should check out assembly language, it beats C in all the metrics you care about.
Assembly isn’t really faster than C in many cases, although it is in some cases, C actually compiles to assembly basically. The speed ups you get from assembly come from the fact that you can hand optimize some things that compilers miss, and it can be useful sometimes, like when writing a very high performance part of software like a game rendering loop or something.
Python uses 10x the memory but probably 100x-1000x the CPU cycles to do the same thing. Also using libraries written for interpreted languages is going to bloat your memory footprint where c libraries are tiny and efficient.
Memory leaks are an issue with all programming languages, although some use what’s called a garbage collector to handle memory which can be okay with some things but terrible in other things like real time software, operating systems, video games, or just anything you don’t want to hitch and lag and run like a turd. Garbage collectors aren’t some magic fix to memory management, if so they would be a part of C. There are huge tradeoffs to not managing your own memory. If you are using c with objects, then you are pretty safe. The object oriented nature of the language makes it very easy to manage memory. That’s mostly what it’s there for besides reducing the amount of redundant code, if you are using inheritance like you are supposed to. This is called a node graph. You store your data under objects so when you want to remove your data you just call a recursive free function on the highest parent object.
The difference really is that C code is efficient, in the sense that it doesn’t waste anything. Every thing that seems low level about C is there for a reason. It came from a time where it was important to write code efficiently. Where every MB and cycle counted. Where having a garbage collector freeing and potentially crashing your operating system was unacceptable as well as extremely slow. It’s still slow btw, because programs have scaled with the ability of hardware to run it, so garbage collectors are still mostly as terrible as they always have been.
C is only low level in the sense that it actually runs on the hardware. There isn’t layers of stuff in-between it and the hardware. There is no good reason to do so, outside of maybe security in some context. You don’t want web resources running on your hardware directly.
All the other stuff that comes with modern languages is mostly nonsense. Type checking is for lazy programmers. It multiplies the time needed to do an operation. There is no good reason for it to exist other than programmers being bad at their job. C is loosely typed btw. It checks types in the compiler where it belongs. If your android phone was written in c++, your battery would last for days, and you could play games on it for hours, and everything would be extremely fast, nearly instant loading of stuff. The reason web pages were written in JiT languages was mainly just for comparability across many different types of hardware and browsers. They were also relatively small programs. Scripting can be useful sometimes, garbage collectors can be useful for script kitty stuff. It has no place in mainstream software and definitely not in operating systems. Google went from “Don’t be evil” to let’s build an entire operating system out of java and spyware. It’s not good. At this rate we aren’t even going to have guis anymore in 10 years because no hardware will be able to run it without destroying itself, and needing to be plugged in constantly, and have $1000 worth of ram from some slave economy that has overpowered us as we have become so unproductive since most people are using windows 12 or some nonsense.
Python uses 10x the memory but probably 100x-1000x the CPU cycles to do the same thing. Also using libraries written for interpreted languages is going to bloat your memory footprint where c libraries are tiny and efficient.
You’ve obviously never looked at benchmarks because you’re one or two orders of magnitude off.
The same reason you don’t use assembly is the reason many use Payton instead of C.
As someone who was trained in C and did most of my programming in it, yes it does everything you need but it’s a major pain in the ass doing it well. It’s slow to get things done and you need decades to get competent at it. Python allows you to get up and running a lot faster.
As cpu and ram are cheap compared to the days when C was a necessity, most programmers have made the decision that getting things going fast and easy was worth the trade off. The market has spoken. There is still a place for C or Rust, but there’s also a place for Python and other interpreted languages. You can make good programs in both but it’s a lot easier to make a garbage program in C.
I’ve used at least 20 computer OS’ dating back to the ‘70s, and despite all your fearmongering, computers keep getting cheaper and easier to use, and for the most part, faster. I’ve got old Macs and PC’s and Linux boxes laying around from 20-30 years ago, and trust me, they aren’t faster or easier to use. There were some good OS’ like AmigaOS or windowing systems like FVWM back in the day that were surprisingly responsive for the time, but Windows and MacOS were all pretty garbage until about windows 7 and Mac OS X. And they costed $4000+ in today’s dollars. You can get laptops these days for $150.
To start with Brazil speaks Portuguese not Spanish
I try to avoid python for two main reasons. While coding, white spaces. Who thought that was a good idea? While using, shared dependancies, again who thought thay was a good idea? I have to use pipx or manually make a venv otherwise python scripts start breaking each other. May as well just package it with its own dependancies from the get go.
I genuinely do not understand the problem with white spaces that people seem to have. Literally any well formatted code will use whitespace for indentation.
I imagine that if python syntax was the norm and then a C-style syntax language appeared, the same group of people would be complaining “curly brackets? Who thought that was a good idea?”
Its a lot easier to find a misplaced semicolon than a double space that should have been single. With C i can make the code visually easier for me to read. I just gotta remember to end the line with ;
“Hold my beer” shouted the Tcl interpreter
right? like if white space weren’t required, how would you format your code differently? arbitrary white space all over the place? no indentation? that is some spicy garbage code
These uh…aren’t issues you need to think about much.
I literally have to think about dependancies every time i install a python script in Debian. It always says its externally managed and use pipx. Then its not in pipx so i have to make a venv. Any other language i download and compile and it only cares about dependancies at build time.
Those are issues I was forced to think about a lot…
I’ll hate on python (or any dynamically typed lang) as much as the next guy, but let’s not be language snobs
Why would you hate on it? It has its usecases. You won’t build an OS in Python, but I’d much rather do data processing in Python than in C
i didn’t say anything negative about it, I like both languages (though python is way easier). i was just stoned and made an observation
I genuinely don’t get it.
That’s because it’s a stupid take. Believing brazil named a programming language after a Spanish word is pretty embarrassing too but I guess English speakers do that constantly.
Who fucking cares use the tool you need.
this post is probably too nieche
yep. this post is too nietzsche
Python is my “native” programming language, it’s the first I learned, and many of my leaps in understanding of the language have resulted from thinking “Wait, Python is a smart ass. I bet it can do…”
