Maybe if your C has aggressive test coverage and you’re using Valgrind religiously and always checking errno when you’re supposed to and you’re checking the return value of everything. Otherwise lol. C as it’s written by middling teams is a soup of macros, three-star variables, and questionable data structure implementations, where everybody fiddles with everybody else’s data. I’ll take good C over bad Python, but good C is rare.
> C as it’s written by middling teams is a soup of macros, three-star variables, and questionable data structure implementations, where everybody fiddles with everybody else’s data. I’ll take good C over bad Python, but good C is rare.
Ironically, the worst production C written in 2025 is almost guaranteed to be better than the average production Python, Javascript, etc.
The only people really choosing C in 2025 are those with a ton of experience under their belt, who are comfortable with the language and its footguns due to decades of experience.
IOW, those people with little experience are not choosing C, and those that do choose it have already, over decades, internalised patterns to mitigate many of the problems.
At the end of the day, in 2025, I'd still rather maintain a system written in a statically typed language than a system written in a dynamically typed language.
> The only people really choosing C in 2025 are those with a ton of experience under their belt, who are comfortable with the language and its footguns due to decades of experience.
Experienced users of C can't be the only people who use it if the language is going to thrive. It's very bad for a language when the only ones who speak it are those who speak it well. The only way you get good C programmers is by cultivating bad C programmers, you can't have one without the other. If you cut off the bad programmers (by shunning or just not appealing to them, or loading your language with too many beginner footguns), there's no pipeline to creating experts, and the language dies when the experts do.
The people who come along to work on their legacy systems are better described as archaeologists than programmers. COBOL of course is the typical example, there's no real COBOL programming community to speak of, just COBOL archeologists who maintain those systems until they too shall die and it becomes someone else's problem, like the old Knight at the end of Indiana Jones.
> Experienced users of C can't be the only people who use it if the language is going to thrive.
I don't think it's going to thrive. It's going to die. Slowly, via attrition, but there you go.