On Apr 17, 2007, at 3:28 AM, Peter P. wrote:
>
>> result: Fortran and Basic died, and every engineering
>> student in North America learned C.

Point 1: I rather doubt that "fortran and basic died"; rather,
they didn't do as well as "C"...

> Most engineering students did not in fact learn C

Agreed.


>  However most computer science students did learn C.

Hmm.  Over what time frame are we talking about?  I didn't
learn C in the late 70s, and they weren't teaching it to
undergrads in the late 80s when I was working at Stanford,
either.  PL/1 and Pascal were the popular languages, with
a fair amount of LISP, and weird "CompSci" languages like
SmallTalk.  C was sortof reserved for the grad students working
on the unix systems, but those (unix systems) were small and
relatively rare, cause it was still the age of the mainframe
for most of the student body.

While unix source code was "widely available to universities",
it WAS very "researchy", and the fact that it was essentially
unavailable to commercial entities limited its impact greatly.


> Basic was a toy at the time C was defined. It did
> not support structured programming

Neither did fortran.  And by the time C was starting to
become "popular", BASIC had grown up a lot.

People tend to forget just how long it was between the time
C was originally developed (1972) and the time it started to
become POPULAR (I'll claim 1987, with the introduction of
turbo C (the 2nd commercial C compiler for the IBM PC), gcc,
and the pending ANSI definition of the language (1989.)

Consider just how long *15 years* is in the computer industry.

I'll also claim C's rise was spurred by the "personal" computer
reaching a plateau of power (1987: 10MHz 80286 systems with 40M
disks!), and the fact that C was NOT saddled with a defined
library that assumed a mainframe sort of environment (like
fortran, PL/1, or even Pascal.)  Fortran was for scientific
programs, Cobol for business programs, PL/1 for either, Pascal
for teaching...  But for the first time all those application
areas were being overshadowed by ... USER applications with
a degree of interactivity they were never designed to support.
(C wasn't designed to support it either, but C was easier to
BEND to new applications.)

BillW
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