On Monday, 20 August 2018 at 03:57:10 UTC, John Carter wrote:
* Choice. ie. Programmers _want_ to use it, not are constrained to use it. * For programming activity, not new projects. ie. The era of vast tracts of green field programming is long gone. We're mostly in the era tinker toys and tidying.
That's a matter of choice, some are tidying, but there's a lot of green field programming even in C, and new languages are all green fields.
There is a big difference between "Doing a lot of" and "Being Good at".
That's why you can't be tidying all the time, you can improve, but can't become good this way.
By tidying I mean refactoring legacy code that is way too large and complex to rewrite all at once.
Nobody is going to deep refactoring; example: C/C++ (well, you mention them too) and pretty much everything. And it's that large because it accumulated garbage and rewrite will cut it to a manageable size; example: s2n (fun fact: it's written in C, but uses slices for safety just like D).
