Way back, when Paul Graham first wrote "A plan for Spam", I was so intrigued upon first reading the article, that I jumped straight into coding.
I happened to be hosting my own mail server at the time, and I had previously implemented a crude spam filter, but the important part is that all my emails were already stored in a database and (crudely) classified as spam or ham, so I had a corpus available for training the classifier.
I spent a couple of hours in 'the zone', and wrote a Bayesian email classifier plus all the database management needed in a few hundred lines of C. The program compiled the first time - a first for me - and worked correctly the first time - another first. It did help that I had been heads-down in a complex project written in C for several months at that time, so my knowledge of the language and good design- and implementation practices were at an all time high.
That same program managed my spam pretty much unaltered for several years, until I switched to a commercial email host. Every few years, I still dig up that code as an example of good design and implementation.
This sounds awesome. C is my preferred language and I use it whenever I can and when it makes sense. I'd love to see this code. Is there a public repo for it?
Try go :) it's got the speed and "here's how the machine works" of C plus a) batteries included for all the modern things, and b) excellent multi-core scheduler.
On the grandparent, I never much wrote a ton of C and then compiled, did more "skeleton of the app/lower level bits/stich them together" incremental stuff. So lots of compiling and testing along the way. Not quite Lispy but Lispy for C.
I have, and I do use it for projects (and plan on using it for more). But I also need C for things that require certain performance I'm unable to get out of Go.
Use Rust, then. Rust is like Go, except its binaries are small and fast (except string formatting, which is very runtime, horribly bloated and merely "fast-ish"). Anything C can do, Rust can do better (the string formatting excepted).
What is it with people insisting on using something other than C? You don't know what I'm working on, yet you're insisting I operate completely differently?
I happened to be hosting my own mail server at the time, and I had previously implemented a crude spam filter, but the important part is that all my emails were already stored in a database and (crudely) classified as spam or ham, so I had a corpus available for training the classifier.
I spent a couple of hours in 'the zone', and wrote a Bayesian email classifier plus all the database management needed in a few hundred lines of C. The program compiled the first time - a first for me - and worked correctly the first time - another first. It did help that I had been heads-down in a complex project written in C for several months at that time, so my knowledge of the language and good design- and implementation practices were at an all time high.
That same program managed my spam pretty much unaltered for several years, until I switched to a commercial email host. Every few years, I still dig up that code as an example of good design and implementation.