Chris's Wiki :: blog/programming/CProgrammersTwoTypes

Here is a provocative thesis:

There are two types of C programmers: people who chose C because they liked various of its properties, or people who used C because it was their best or only option at the time.

Back in the days, C was somewhere between your best option or your only real option for doing certain sorts of programming. If you were writing a Unix program, for example, for quite a while C was your only real choice (then later you could consider C++). The people who came to C often found some of its virtues to be attractive, but they weren't necessarily strongly committed to it; they'd picked C as an expedient choice.

Meanwhile, there are people who looked at C and felt (and often still feel) that it was very much the language for them (out of those available at the time). They feel strongly drawn to C's virtues, often explicitly in contrast to other languages, and today they may still program in C out of choice. If and when they switch languages they often pick languages that are as close to the virtues of C (as each person sees them) as possible.

I am the first sort of C programmer. I like some aspects of C but there are others that I more or less always found to be kind of a pain; as I've kind of said before, I no longer want to have to think about memory management and related issues. So I've wound up mostly in the Go camp, despite Go's garbage collection being anathema to a certain sort of C programmer.

(Thinking about memory management can be fun every so often, just as it can be fun to optimize anything, but I want it to be an optimization, not a mandatory thought.)

My perception of the second sort of C programmer is that if they've moved to any more recent mainstream language, it's probably Rust. Rust is certainly not C-like in some respects, but in a lot of ways its virtues are the most C-like out of all of the mainstream languages (and some of the ways it's better than C are important).

(Like all provocative theses, this is a generalization and simplification. People had and have many reasons for choosing C. And yes, there are non-mainstream languages that are trying to be 'a better C' in ways that are significantly different from Rust.)