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Comment by stephencanon | Hacker News Reader

There’s also engineers’ belief that they have learned the language despite only half-knowing it at best.

I think this is actually one of the selling points of C over other languages. Certainly it's easy to fool yourself into thinking you know any language better than you do, but C genuinely is relatively tiny, and I think it's reasonable to expect to become familiar with almost everything in the language in a month or so of full-time work. After a decade of day job C++ coding, I'd not say the same for myself there.

Rust and C++ lately have been particularly quickly moving targets to keep up with, where C is still pretty much the same as C99. The compilers are better, their warnings are better, sanitizer modes are incredible, but the things you type into your text editor to express your program structure are still pretty much the same thing.

I could have been more precise when I said it's easy to fool yourself into thinking you know _any_ language better than you do... both rustc and ghc have made it abundantly and repeatedly clear that I don't know Rust and Haskell well, and the "if it compiles, it's probably correct" trust that develops from that frustration is a great asset to both those languages.

But those are exceptions: I've definitely felt like I've known more than I really did about at least C, C++, Java, Scheme, Python, Go, bash, Javascript, cron, and several assembly variants, and those platforms did little to stop me from learning about my inexperience in difficult, sometimes embarrassing, sometimes expensive ways.

I'm a big fan of more compile time analysis any way it can be done, and whatever can't at runtime. More types, more proofs, more fuzzing, more sanitizers, and also where possible, more restricted execution models than Turing-complete. Any code that can't prove itself correct is a serious liability. I just also like C... it's got many footguns, yes indeed, it's practically constructed out of only footguns, but there are only like 8 of them, and they're all right there waiting for you to get to know them. It's like having a few good sharp knives in your kitchen. You get to know each well, using them one at a time---and if any is missing from the block you pause everything and look around very carefully.

> but C genuinely is relatively tiny,

Relatively tiny and with a disproportionate number of footguns.

Not really that much In my experience. Most of the unsafety is very obvious and most of the memory safety really come from errors from this obviously unsafe parts, e.g. the most common memory safety bug is pointer arithmetic gone wrong. The others are temporal memory safety and signed integer overflows. None of this is really subtle or what I would really call a footgun. Nowadays, programmers do not seem to understand integer conversion rules of C anymore (although they are simply IMHO), but then this is something which can be mitigated via sanitizers.

I doubt that a month of so of full work will get someone fully proficient on e.g. the finer details of integer promotions and how they can break things in non-obvious ways (think of situations such as combining signed and unsigned operands of different widths). The fundamental problem is that sane production code written in C will generally deliberately avoid some aspects of the language precisely because they are so footgun-prone, which means that if you learn solely by experience, you may never even become aware of the footgun behind the pattern.

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