unicolet.org

In a chat on the refactoring community somebody mentioned Nerves Project as an alternative to the reigning programming language (C) in embedded systems. I was at the airport with 30' to kill and decided to check it out and see how I could go in just half an hour. Turns out I managed to fully compile the hello_nerves project and stopped short of flashing the image to a rpi3 which I did not have with me. I find this pretty impressive, considering it's a fully-fleshed Linux-based system for half hour of work on a flaky internet connection.

Youtube rarely makes great recommendations anymore, but this time it did. Yday found this recording of a CppCon presentation from 2016  ( slides ) in my feed and made some time to watch it. It's pretty long, due to an extended Q&A section at the end which I mostly skipped, but well worth watching. The presentation itself is great and masterfully explores the reasons why we're still using C instead of C++ (especially if C++ is such a better alternative?) from a psychological/sociological point of view. The presenter quickly shows that technical arguments are just not effective, and also explains why. I've greatly enjoyed it because it aligns with some of my leadership beliefs, and also because I don't understand (or I guess I don't have the same frame of reference) people who pick C as their preferred programming language. I've done a bit of C programming while I served in Mapserver PSC maintaining the Swig/Java bindings and to sum my experience up: what...