Comment by orionblastar

C was never a gateway to any flavor of Pascal, a "police state language".

I think so to, for most devs C is like Latin, or Roman Law, not something we develop and use, but rather something we learn for context and to understand future developments.

There's some people that still develop on C for sure, but it's limited to FOSS and embedded at this point, Low Level proprietary systems having migrated to C++ or Rust mostly.

I agree with the main thesis that C isn't a language like the others, something that we practice, that it's mostly an ancient but highly influential language, and it's an API/ABI.

What I disagree with is that 'critiquing' C is productive in the same way that critiquing Roman Law or Latin or Plato is productive, the horse is dead, one might think they are being clever or novel for finding flaws in the dead horse, but it's more often a defense mechanism to justify having a hard time learning the decades of backwards compatibility, edge cases and warts that have been developed.

It's easier to think of the previous generation as being dumb and having made mistakes that could have been fixed, and that it all could be simpler, rather than recognize that engineering is super complex and that we might as well dedicate our full life to learning this craft and still not make a dent.

I applaud the new generation for taking on this challenge and giving their best shot at the revolution, but I'm personally thinking of bridging the next-next generation and the previous generation of devs, the historical complexity of the field will increase linearly with time and I think if we pace ourselves we can keep the complexity down, and the more times we hop unto a revolution that disregards the previous generation as dumb, the bigger the complexity is going to be.