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Our Machinery Guidebook (ourmachinery.com)
20 points by todsacerdoti on July 6, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 7 comments


Yes! Solid guidelines that will last ages. This is the sort of practical company I would be looking to work for, if I were looking for work. It's refreshing to see a company that isn't chasing the next great language as if it were a solution to the "problem" of producing quality code.

re other comments: There's nothing "cultish" about hewing to C. Yes, C has (had) some atrociously unsafe string manipulation libs, but that's a straw man. Those libs only exist to allow C backward compatibility. There are many modern, yet mature, libs that handle strings safely. Contemporary C programmers aren't struggling with strings, they're struggling with the very same problems as programmers of Forth, Lisp, Python, and every other language. Which is to say - the language is neither the problem, nor the solution.

Don't get me wrong, I have my favorite languages: Forth, Common Lisp, C# (really!) and, yes, C. But, at the end of the day it's the difference between leather and cloth seats in your Jag. You probably feel more comfortable in one than the other, but they both get you where you're going, and it probably wasn't that much worse if you had the one that wasn't your preference. The "traffic" wasn't altered by your choice of vehicular amenities and the real problems in programming don't really change with your choice of language.


One principle they should add:

Don't screw with keyboard input on webpages, thus disabling some visitor's preferred method of navigation.


we use C/C++ for everything. This includes things like command-line tools and documentation generators which would be tempting to write in a scripting language, such as Ruby or Python.

Ahh, great. Move along...


From business point of view it might be a good solution to stick to only one language in stack.


What's wrong with that?


String work in C for starters. Commonly accepted best practice is to use the least powerful language for any given problem. This is so it's (a) readable (b) portable (c) nominally secure (d) preserving of programmer time.

While there are exceptions, their reasons are questionable at best. It seems more like a declaration of a cultish C culture. Which, in context, is probably attractive to some of the people they're looking for, but hideously backward by general standards. Use the right tool for the job.


Yesh...




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