If an old timer who used to be good with C wanted to use C again, would they have to learn a whole bunch of weird new stuff or could they pretty much use it like they did back in the stone age (i.e., the 20th century)?
Back in the '80s and '90s I was pretty good at C. I don't think there was anything about the language or the compilers than that I did not understand. I used C to write real time multitasking kernels for embedded systems, device drivers and kernel extensions for Unix, Windows, Mac, Netware, and OS/2. I did a Unix port from swapping hardware to paging hardware, rewriting the processes and memory subsystems. I tricked a friend into writing a C compiler. I could hold my own with the language lawyers on comp.lang.c.
Somewhere in there I started using C++, but only as a C with more flexible strings, constructors, destructors, and "for (int i = ...)", and later added STL containers to that.
Sometime in the 2000s, I ended up spending more and more time on smaller programs that were mostly processing text, and Perl became my main tool. Also I ended up spending a lot of helping out less experiences people at work who were doing things in PHP, or JavaScript, or Java. My C and C++ trickled to nothing.
I've occasionally looked at modern C++, but it is so different from what I was doing back in '90s or even early '00s I sometimes have to double check that I'm actually looking at C++ code.
Is modern C like that, or is it still at its core the same language I used to know well?
Back in the '80s and '90s I was pretty good at C. I don't think there was anything about the language or the compilers than that I did not understand. I used C to write real time multitasking kernels for embedded systems, device drivers and kernel extensions for Unix, Windows, Mac, Netware, and OS/2. I did a Unix port from swapping hardware to paging hardware, rewriting the processes and memory subsystems. I tricked a friend into writing a C compiler. I could hold my own with the language lawyers on comp.lang.c.
Somewhere in there I started using C++, but only as a C with more flexible strings, constructors, destructors, and "for (int i = ...)", and later added STL containers to that.
Sometime in the 2000s, I ended up spending more and more time on smaller programs that were mostly processing text, and Perl became my main tool. Also I ended up spending a lot of helping out less experiences people at work who were doing things in PHP, or JavaScript, or Java. My C and C++ trickled to nothing.
I've occasionally looked at modern C++, but it is so different from what I was doing back in '90s or even early '00s I sometimes have to double check that I'm actually looking at C++ code.
Is modern C like that, or is it still at its core the same language I used to know well?