Tim Kellogg

Was C For Hipsters?

Last week I came across this tweet:

It’s true, JavaScript gets a lot of hate these days for various reasons. Some of those reasons are definitely legitimate concerns, but a lot of it is just noise. Still, this could be an interesting case study into computer programmer’s history of hating languages, so I shot a quick email off to my dad.

Hey dad,

I saw this tweet and I want to know the answer. Since you were around when C came out, did it have a bad reputation for making things too easy? Like too much abstraction or whatever? Like the crap JavaScript gets today

Tim

One of the benefits of having a dad that’s been an realtime embedded C developer for most of his career is that I can ask him questions like this and I get really interesting replies. Sure enough, he delivered (minimal editing by me):

Well, back then there was no Internet, so it was harder to assess reputation.

C did not have a bad reputation about being too easy. There was, however, a lot of concern about “tight code” and efficiency (of the code), and how the compiler measured up to a competent assembly programmer.

When I switched from assembly to C in 1981, there was never any question about programmer efficiency improvements. The rough rule “10 lines per hour, regardless of the language” was true for both. But a line of C could do the work of two to eight lines of assembly.

By programming at a higher level of abstraction with C, there were entire classes of bugs in assembly that went away. For instance, using a ‘branch less than’ vs a ‘branch less than or equal’ vs ‘branch greater than’ vs …

In assembly, it took much more effort to clearly document the intent, because there were so many more saplings in the forest to clutter the view. There were labels that were truly part of the logical structure (loops, etc), and then a lot of distracting labels just to jump around the linear execution of the assembly code.

The early C compilers did tend to be buggy, and it was not uncommon to ‘code around a compiler bug’ (hopefully with a comment explaining the rational).

The optimizations tended to be poor, too. I once created a bunch of commotion on the GCC list, when I compared the size of the generated code to a commercial compiler. I must have hit a nerve somewhere, because within a couple of days the GCC code size was reduced by about a third.

In the early days of C, debugging was almost always done at assembly level. In a way, this was good because the engineer was always ‘peer reviewing’ the compiler’s code generation. But efficiency again increased when symbolic C source level debuggers became widely available.

Early Windows programming in C was painful, because the engineer needed to set up everything manually. Typically, this would take a couple pages of C code, with arcane incantations and rituals. When Microsoft introduced Visual Studio to automatically hide and abstract most of the setup, then I think the concern “too easy” perhaps became more prevalent.

The other part of “too easy” came from not needing to debug at the assembly level – programmers lost a feel for the implementation of the C code. I saw this happen a lot, and it was a significant handicap for some of our guys.

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For a time, there was the thought “real men program in assembly”. But the economic advantages of higher abstraction, the arrival of (mostly) bug-free compilers, and source-level debuggers pretty much killed that mindset.

IMO, a good systems-level/embedded software engineer should at least once walk through and understand the assembly implementation of interrupt vectors, a task context switch, multi-precision math, pointer indirection, subroutine register calling convention, implementation of high-level data structures, etc.