Case in point, I bought a bunch of metric bolts and nuts at Amazon, and they wouldn't screw onto each other. They would get to some random point and the nuts would stop turning. Sometimes it was half an inch up,

There's your problem!

But seriously, this doesn't generally match my experience. I haven't bought nuts and bolts there because they're cheaply and readily available locally, though China is obviously more than capable of making screws at scale. So much consumer electronics is made there, they can certainly do that.

It is strictly a market place, so YMMV, but honestly... it's pretty good.

If I respond in a NON LEFTEST way, I usually get banned for 1-2 days.

Oh they only ban for 1-2 days for really racist posts?

They are NOT a free speech place.

Free speech does not mean any particular person is obligated to give you a platform for racism. If you want to be racist in company head on over to X or Truth Social.

I was there for the beginning and in the end they went way overboard on the SJW.

Translation: people did not appreciate my racist comments.

but if you don't know what the compiler is going to do with your code you should have used another language.

I would say this rules out about 99.99% of C programmers from using C then.

The problem is that the areas where the evangelists want Rust to save the world,

Eh? I'm just making an argument about what the compiler is doing.

you're usually going to be doing that.

This is exceptionally doubtful.

It's a mirage.

It is not. Even if we wildly overestimate the amount of raw pointer fuckage you actually need to, say, 50% of kernel code you've still got the compiler eliminating certain bug classes in the remaining 50% of code. That is no mirage.

Most of the time when you can have all the protections, why are you even trying to use a compiled language?

At this point I don't know if you're asking a rhetorical question or if you genuinely don't know why one would want to use a compiled language.

Keep telling yourself that

It's very easy to keep doing because you keep flinging poo without saying anything of substance.

Seriously, Rust and C share an application domain,

Yes.

And Rust is complex.

Yes, and? Never said it wasn't. If you want a simple language, use Brainfuck or Unlambda. Few languages are simpler than those. When you actually think and understand why they are bad languages for programming, you will just get an inkling of why having a simple language can simply push complexity onto the programmer.

Incidentally, I am not a "C fanatic"

Flinging invective, saying nothing of substance? Yeah you're a fanatic.

I have to push back against your assumption that Rust is a language that limits developers. It absolutely does not. As for the AI bit... I use AI to write code all day. It's great, but it makes the same sort of mistakes humans do. I find Rust is a great language for AI to write (under appropriate supervision).

I have fun programming in Rust. I don't like programming in C. I do like programming in C++. I like building type systems that prevent errors and automate drudgery. Both C++ and Rust let me do that, C does not.

I think the point of your "you will have fun programming in C" is that in both languages (and C++) you spend a fair amount of time thinking about low-level details of what the compiler is generating. That's true, and I like thinking about memory layouts, cache lines, what the optimizer is going to do, etc. But I don't like all of the tedium C forces on me.

On balance, I prefer Rust over every other language I've used.

I think C fanatics are possibly even worse than Rust fanatics.

No debate, no argument, just flinging poo and ignoring the last 70 years of computer science development.

I note you didn't actually address a single point. It's because you know you can't and know you are wrong.

My overall strategy is very different. I don't think Claude's code is remotely good enough yet, so I don't trust it to go off and do "development" semi-unsupervised. I direct and review everything it writes, and I control the scope and content of every commit. To be a little more precise, Claude's code is generally fine (if a bit over-commented), but Claude rarely produces code structure that is clear, clean and correctly-mapped to the problem domain, to my (very picky) eyes. So I never just turn it loose on a large, multi-commit development task.

Well, you'd be wrong, but don't let it change your opinion.

I like C++, it's fun. Nice combination of being able to do whateverthefuck you want but also you can program the compiler. C has the former but not the latter, and as a programmer I like to program rather than be weirdly precious about not programing the compiler.

I love AWK. It's just so good at what it does, and amazingly underrated.

BASH is my homeboy.

sed, because sometimes life is too easy

Python and Java are... fine. I like programming in general and they scratch those itches but I don't love the languages.

Machine code a fun once but once is enough.

I quite like PIC ASM on tiny tiny PICs. Don't love doing bigger things in it really.

Shader graphs are just fun.

TCL is the bananas platonic ideal of a stringly typed language and I enjoy it exists. I had some fun programing in it once, but I would not like to do it a lot. It's sort of fun just for being strange and alien but masquerading as a more normal language.

RPN languages (PS, Forth) just never gelled with how I work, but I have had fun with postscript in the past.

MATLAB is a bit aggravating and Octave fixes some of the more egregiously annoying things about it.

Oh yeah and scripting complex actions etc in BOOM compatible engines is let us say, barrels of fun.

But C? I love the language for what it is, an appreciate the artistry of it. But for fun of programming? It feels like being stuck locked out of a workshop with all the good tool in.

Entropy is the default state; order and good outcomes are unnatural and require significant energy and focus to impose.

If Rust is too complex then so is C.

C pushes ALL of the complexity onto the programmer, whereas more recent languages get the computer to do things it's good at.

It also does not, as Linus has pointed out, prevent logic errors.

That's not wrong, it's also not right either. For example, C has no way of distinguishing between a pointer to an array, a pointer to a single datum and a pointer to an object which might not exist (i.e.one that can hold NULL), and of course nothing about the ownership of the pointee. No covering all the cases is a logic error in C, and one the language provides no assistance with.

In C++ and Rust you can distinguish between those cases, which makes not writing logic errors easier (rust goes further on the ownership side).

There are all sorts of things in both languages which allow you to design your code so that certain logic errors are almost impossible by construction. You still have to design it that way, so the language doesn't per-se "prevent it", but allows you to use the language to prevent it. C does not give you enough control to do such things.

On the other hand, C does exactly what you tell it to do.

Not exactly. It does what the compiler, through blind, fast, accurate and utterly mechanically stupid application of the rules of the standard believes you have told it. The standard has scope to allow for demons to fly from your nose and the compiler will oblige you in that if you accidentally ask it to.

Rust always feels like a constant argument with the compiler (linter really?) where it keeps going 'I understand what you are trying to but am not going to do it'

Well not really because you're saying "I want you to do X and prove Y", but the compiler is telling you it cannot prove "Y" if you do "X". But you're asking it to prove Y. So it's doing exactly what you asked (trying to prove Y).

If you don't want it to prove Y than you can always just temporarily switch off the prover (i.e. borrow checker[*]) and fuck around with dereferencing raw pointers to your heart's content in an unsafe block.

[*]Hey rustaceans no one cares about your language specific terminological pedantry when discussing things which include, but are not limited to rust.

If you have fun programming in Rust, you will have fun programming in C.

Programming in C is a bit of a slog, frankly. You have to do every. little. thing. by. hand, even though there's a perfectly good computer sitting right there you could (in principle) use to automate away tedious stuff.

On the other hand, a standardized package label that tells me how to recycle the package is useful, regardless of how much of that type of packaging gets recycled.

If there's nowhere to recycle it then it's not telling you how to recycle the material.

It doesn't matter if there are no facilities for recycling that type of packaging nearby today. There might be in a year or three.

Or never. It might not be something that's practical to recycle with current technology.

The state can publish a report on how much of each type of plastic is actually being recycled. This is much less invasive than requiring state-specific package labeling

It's also much much less informative. If it isn't being recycled in California, the largest, richest state in the union you can be sure that Arkansas doesn't in fact have a plant capable of separating layered packaging.