I am sick to see every other Blogger being out there and pointing to that Why C Is Not My Favourite Programming Language article as answer to the PASCALrant and shouting hoe hoe hoe ... 70th, no hash, no string, PHP is better, My-Language-Is-LongerBetter ...

If you feel called by name:

[ ] You understand what you are talking about!

What I have to say to that PASCAL article: See it as a rant. It is well referenced and has some valid points of purely technical nature and it is at least just a moaning of a frustrated engineer.

So now we take a look at the C article. Any reference? Aehm, I can't see any, or you mean the UNIX Haters Handbook?! Poor guy! Let's desect this thing:

Strings That all floating around argument about strings. Later on we see it: he wants to put a string in a switch-statement. As that asks for a comparison operator we got you on your throat. How you decide that kuro5hin is bigger than küro5hin. Is the chinese character for five bigger than your arabic number? You want this to be decided by a programming language? Just out of that: you did not wrote any serious piece of code dude! You do not want to have unicode strings? Sure but than you do not need strings at all. Or do you talking about C++ ... apple and oranges?

Hashes Who in his right mind asks for a hash (as it is a prerequisite for a hash table) implementation in a programming language does not understand what is a hash in the first place. As far as I can remember my friends and me do not have enough fingers and toes to count the implementations of a hash. So please, what kind of hash you want have in your C language. You want all of them, dynamicly? Than here we go: any object file with that compiler go out for a fancy 10meg+ for "Hello World". Thanks, thats what we need for the kernel of your OS! The guys from Python and other languages fame just provide you one which does not collide for most cases. I think I do not want to ask for all that cases you need to implement your own. Talking realtime? Therefore, if you have a task to accomplish, choose your tools carefully. And no, C is not always the way to go.

break my code That break example: welcome to the I-call-for-a-goto (apparently he even points to it). If you need to say you want to break 3 your code, your algorithm has a problem. Yes a break 3 is a damn goto. Some say goto is evil, again that is wrong: use it careful and I don't see if break 3 makes it careful. A break is a break and not a conditional break - use goto if you need it, it is more flexible. But don't come whining around if it breaks your code.

Blaming the LanguageProgrammer Self critique? This rant shows it so obviously: if you stumble in darkness about that language, don't use it. It is far from black magic, but you need to read the docs and specs. In the C-case there is more than one case you can stretch your finger and say: You bastard compiler! But do not blame the language for it. It does what it does. If you want to do it easier, sexier ... use another language. And just as a hint: major parts of your operating system are written in C. How can it work when that language is so evil, why didn't they do it Python? Oh, yes I see, Python is written in C?