<story><title>Why Aren&apos;t There C Conferences?</title><url>https://nullprogram.com/blog/2018/11/21/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mikestew</author><text>Because though there might be building trades conferences, there are no hammer conferences. Oh, there will be tool vendors &lt;i&gt;at&lt;/i&gt; the building trades conferences, there might be sessions on &amp;quot;Efficient Hammering Techniques Using Machine Learning&amp;quot;, but there are no conferences about hammers. Don&amp;#x27;t forget about the blacksmith conference next week, they&amp;#x27;ll have hammer vendors, too.&lt;p&gt;I dunno, a Ruby conference kinda makes sense because one will mostly build web sites with it, so it&amp;#x27;s really going to be a &amp;quot;Building $FOO with $TOOL&amp;quot; kind of thing. But C is so widely used, it&amp;#x27;s like having that HammerFest 2019 with everyone from people splitting wood with a sledghammer to jewelers with their teensy little tapping tools. I just don&amp;#x27;t see the diamond workers drinking with the lumberjacks at the hotel bar after hours. :-) I jest, but it&amp;#x27;s mostly about networking anyway, otherwise just watch the videos online.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SiVal</author><text>To find the answer, I would ask, Why &lt;i&gt;are&lt;/i&gt; there conferences for other technologies? What are they for?&lt;p&gt;And I think the answer is probably 1) get useful news about recent and upcoming changes and 2) to socialize. I&amp;#x27;m going to guess--possibly just projecting--that most C developers are older and not terribly interested in meeting new &amp;quot;C friends&amp;quot; or jumping into some hot, new &amp;quot;C startup&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;That leaves #1. Web&amp;#x2F;AI-ML&amp;#x2F;cloud&amp;#x2F;mobile tech conferences feature speakers from the big tech companies that might reveal, in a talk or a hallway chat, info about which of your problems they are about to solve or to cause. Independent speakers serve a sort of journalist role of gathering intel from the big companies, organizing it, and revealing their findings. It&amp;#x27;s all about &amp;quot;tell me what I need to know so I can decide what to do&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;But there isn&amp;#x27;t much news about C that most C programmers will want to know in order to make decisions. It&amp;#x27;s almost like news about algebra or, yes, hammers: mature, slow-changing technologies whose changes seldom impact more than a small percentage of users.&lt;p&gt;So without reasons 1 or 2, the answer to why aren&amp;#x27;t there C conferences is basic and boring: what important purpose would they serve?</text></comment>
<story><title>Why Aren&apos;t There C Conferences?</title><url>https://nullprogram.com/blog/2018/11/21/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mikestew</author><text>Because though there might be building trades conferences, there are no hammer conferences. Oh, there will be tool vendors &lt;i&gt;at&lt;/i&gt; the building trades conferences, there might be sessions on &amp;quot;Efficient Hammering Techniques Using Machine Learning&amp;quot;, but there are no conferences about hammers. Don&amp;#x27;t forget about the blacksmith conference next week, they&amp;#x27;ll have hammer vendors, too.&lt;p&gt;I dunno, a Ruby conference kinda makes sense because one will mostly build web sites with it, so it&amp;#x27;s really going to be a &amp;quot;Building $FOO with $TOOL&amp;quot; kind of thing. But C is so widely used, it&amp;#x27;s like having that HammerFest 2019 with everyone from people splitting wood with a sledghammer to jewelers with their teensy little tapping tools. I just don&amp;#x27;t see the diamond workers drinking with the lumberjacks at the hotel bar after hours. :-) I jest, but it&amp;#x27;s mostly about networking anyway, otherwise just watch the videos online.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>maxxxxx</author><text>Exactly. C programmers don&amp;#x27;t define themselves as C programmers mainly. They are firmware developers, game developers or something else. That&amp;#x27;s where their real interest is.</text></comment>