Comment by thraw_oway
3 years ago
Personally I feel the C committee should've disbanded after the first standard (the C++ one, after the 2003 technical corrigendum). I didn't mind C99 much, but it looks like C(++)reeping featuritis is a nasty habit.
These gratuitous standards prompt newbies to use the new features (it's "modern") and puzzled veterans to keep up and reinternalize understanding of new variants of languages they've been using for decades. There's no real improvement, just churn. Possibly it's one of the instruments of ageism. More incompatibility with existing software and existing programmers.
Having to learn new things throughout your career isn't ageism.
The question is: which other things, and why?
One problem of this new millennium is that the field has developed a tendency to do old things with new languages instead of doing new things with old languages.
Reinventing another polygonal wheel approximation while constantly tweaking the theory used serves to segregate the experienced (who may have trouble accepting such tweaks or their necessity - they already know about the existence of wheels anyway) from the newbies (who have no previous intuitions and no taste for legitimate and spurious novelty).
Newbies are cheap, and new ideas are hard. Let's do some mental rent seeking.