Senior Devs on New Languages: Just C with Extra Steps
Description
This is a two-panel meme using a popular format from the animated TV show 'Rick and Morty'. The top panel has the text: 'When you ask senior about new programming language'. The bottom panel shows the character Rick Sanchez explaining something to his grandson Morty and a green alien character, with the subtitle text reading, 'It's like C but with extra step'. This meme humorously captures a common sentiment among seasoned senior developers who have seen numerous programming languages rise and fall. The joke is that many modern, high-level languages are fundamentally built upon the same core principles pioneered by foundational languages like C, with the new features, syntax, and paradigms being merely 'extra steps' or layers of abstraction on top. It reflects a cynical, reductive, but often relatable perspective on the tech industry's constant hype cycle around new tools that often solve old problems in slightly different ways
Comments
22Comment deleted
It's all just C until you see the node_modules folder, then it's C with 1.5GB of extra steps
Every “next-gen systems” pitch ends the same: C’s semantics, a 500 MB toolchain, two layers of YAML, and a guarantee that if it segfaults, at least the compiler feels bad about it
After 20 years of watching languages promise to 'fix' C's problems, you realize they're all just adding syntactic sugar to the same memory management nightmares - except now with dependency hell and a 500MB runtime thrown in for good measure
After two decades of watching 'revolutionary' languages emerge, senior engineers develop a superpower: the ability to instantly recognize that Rust is C with borrow checking, Go is C with garbage collection, and most 'modern' languages are just C wearing increasingly elaborate safety equipment. It's not cynicism - it's pattern matching at scale
Every new language pitch is “C but safer” - translation: undefined behavior swapped for a 4GB toolchain and a build that needs its own SRE
New language demo: “It’s C, but with a runtime, a borrow checker, generics, and a 300MB toolchain that still ends up calling malloc; the extra step is pretending it isn’t C.”
New langs? C with extra steps to forget segfaults exist - until the optimizer undoes it all
Everything is like c but with extra steps Comment deleted
C is 💩 tho Comment deleted
Only retards have this opinion Comment deleted
Developer time costs more than processor time Comment deleted
except when it doesn't Comment deleted
Of course, for plenty of applications Comment deleted
honesly, this is why we can't have nice things and have electron Comment deleted
Haha, well, I wouldn't quite go that far. I'm not a massive fan of electron apps, but there's a saving to made in having the same language for serverside, frontend, and native applications. Once you are doing something important, or have funding, you should be considering replacing it though. *looks at discord with distain* Comment deleted
well, you don't have to, if it works it works, noone cares if it doesn't sync with system or looks like shit Comment deleted
Retards Comment deleted
Yeah, that's why that message was followed with Börgඞr: except when it doesn't Deer Spangle: Of course, for plenty of applications Comment deleted
Though I suspect C won't hold that low level throne forever either. Rust is always making headway. But that's a different discussion Comment deleted
in that discussion i also state that c is never going away, either, bc it can target more hardware Comment deleted
Similar was said of cobol Comment deleted
ok then Comment deleted