Why am I writing this post? Not because I hope for something or believe in change. These are just words. I could write this at the end, but then you would be looking for answers for me while reading, and I don’t need them. They won’t change anything.
So here it is. I don’t claim to be a software development guru or a C language expert. I’m just a simple developer.
Why are we looking for new technologies? Why do we want to be part of a community that is buzzing with new projects? Why do we think that this new programming language will definitely help us create something amazing and truly great and, of course, will make us rich and provide us with a comfortable old age?
Why are we offered so many courses in so many programming languages and frameworks? Why do we teach what is required for companies that make money from us?
Why are there a lot of conferences on banal simple things, such as *** framework or ### technology (so as not to offend anyone), and there, with a smart look, newly minted gurus tell us how important it is to be able to transfer the value to the client and how to use certain templates?
Why do computers become more and more powerful, but programs continue to lag?
Why, when applying for a job, do we look for a vacancy based on knowledge of a programming language, but find it only based on knowledge of certain frameworks? Is it really difficult for a professional programmer to learn a framework in a week?
Why do we go into software development with the enthusiasm to create something great, but end up in a situation where we are developing some other catalog or some other digital yo-yo to make money?
Reason: because we want our passion for programming, our interest, to also bring us income.
Feature: we do not earn this money for ourselves, but for companies whose main goal is to quickly receive income from the software they sell.
Bugs: posts like this one.
One problem with this is that C is in no way the “roots” of programming; it’s older than most of the languages we use today, but Fortran, Lisp, and Cobol are all older and are also still in use. (And of course there are other languages that predate C but have mostly fallen out of use, such as Pascal.) It feels “low-level” because it closely reflects the hardware for which it was originally designed, the PDP-7 and later the PDP-11. But in fact it hasn’t truly been “low-level” for a long time: I highly recommend the ACM article “C Is Not a Low-level Language; Your computer is not a fast PDP-11.”