I learned C in about 1989/1990 and have used it a lot since then. I have worked on a fair amount of rotten commercial C code, sold at a high price, in which every millimeter of extra functionality was bought with sweat and blood. I once spent a month finding a memory corruption issue that happened every 2 weeks with a completely different stack trace which, in the end, required a 1-line fix.

The effort was usually out of proportion with the achievement.

I crashed my own computer a lot before I got Linux. Do you remember far pointers? :-( In those days millions of dollars were made by operating systems without memory protection that couldn't address more than 640k of memory. One accepted that programs sometimes crashed the whole computer - about once a week on average.

Despite considering myself an acceptable programmer I still make mistakes in C quite easily and I use valgrind or the sanitizers quite heavily to save myself from them. I think the proliferation of other languages is the result of all this.

In spite of this I find C elegant and I think 90% of my errors are in string handling so therefore if it had a decent string handling library it would be enormously better. I don't really think pure ASCIIZ strings are so marvelous or so fast that we have to accept their bullshit.

> I learned C in about 1989/1990 and have used it a lot since then. I have worked on a fair amount of rotten commercial C code, sold at a high price, in which every millimeter of extra functionality was bought with sweat and blood. I once spent a month finding a memory corruption issue that happened every 2 weeks with a completely different stack trace which, in the end, required a 1-line fix.

That sums up one of my old roles where this kind of thing accounted for about 10% of my time over a 10 year period.

Heisenbug, mutating stack traces, weeks between occurrences, 1 line fix, do some other interesting work before the next weird thing comes along.

I think the longest running one I had (several years) was some weird interaction between pthread_cond_wait() and pthread_cond_broadcast(). Ugh.