Hacker News Reader

>We're probably already far past the point of "There are more competent Python programmers than competent C programmers."

Maybe this is the point where we need to start thinking about where we went wrong? I know that nobody cares about performance anymore, but if anybody is really thinking about Python as a replacement for C then that makes me sad.

View on HN

I don't think the claim is that Python is a good replacement for C. But there are probably more (business) problems for which Python is the right tool to solve it then problems for which C is the right tool.

C is also a lot harder than Python to learn.

So for these reasons there are more Python programmers than C programmers.

For some subset of problems for which C is a good tool, Rust is a good alternative, arguably with less foot guns. For some other problems that are solved with C, Golang is a good alternative.

So in the end C is losing marketshare because of all these reasons.

I think the success of Go and Rust show that lots of people care about performance. But it has to come second to correctness and safety/security, and C makes achieving those things very difficult compared to other languages.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com