Change-my-mind meme claims only language D could ever dethrone C
Description
Outdoor "Change My Mind" meme scene: a person in a blue sweatshirt sits at a small folding table on a brick-paved path, holding a black coffee mug. A large white banner, duct-taped to the front of the table, reads in bold text: "Unless it's named D, it can't replace C" followed by a smaller "CHANGE MY MIND" tagline. Loose papers, a pen, and another mug rest on the tabletop; park benches, trees, and campus buildings appear in the background. Technically, the sign riffs on decades of programming-language succession debates - asserting that the only true successor to the venerable C language would have to be literally called "D", poking fun at attempts by Rust, Go, Zig, and others to claim that crown. The meme leverages language-war humor familiar to seasoned developers who remember C’s dominance and the naming conventions that spawned C++, Objective-C, and the relatively niche D language
Comments
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C++ was just the post-increment; the next eval returns D - every other “C killer” is undefined behavior
After 20 years in this industry, I've seen Rust evangelists promise zero-cost abstractions, Go advocates swear by simplicity, and Zig developers claim they've finally solved metaprogramming - but they all still compile to the same segfaults we've been debugging since 1972
This is the kind of technically correct argument that wins code reviews but loses friends. Sure, renaming 'C' to 'E' would break every reference in the codebase, but that's what find-and-replace is for... unless you also have variables named 'CACHE', 'CONST', or 'CLASS'. Then you're in for a fun afternoon of regex debugging and explaining to your team lead why the build is broken. The real change-my-mind moment: convincing anyone that single-letter variable names were a good idea in the first place
C's been 'one segfault from retirement' since '72; D shows up with GC and suddenly it's 'feature creep'
Everyone wants to replace C until they meet the ABIs, vendor headers, and build scripts - at scale, the only D that replaces C is duct_tape across the FFI boundary
Every 'C replacement' roadmap starts: bootstrap the compiler in C, bind to libc via FFI, ship, promise to remove it in v2 - the alphabet is still the only migration plan that ships on time