On Dec 29, 2010, at 3:35 PM, Michael Watterson wrote:

>> yet we are (almost) all using C ...  Why? I guess C
>> must have done something right, but I am not sure what it is.
>
> Purely because C was language of Choice for UNIX, BSD, MSDOS, =20
> Windows, Linux.
>
> Popularity rather than anything.

Your memory doesn't match my memory.  "popularity" would have meant =20
that we'd all be programming in Fortran or Cobol.  Unix wasn't =20
generally available.  MSDOS C compilers lagged other languages by =20
several years.  Early C compilers were pretty sucky.  Borland's Pascal =20
was pretty good pre-dated their C compiler by quite a bit.

What happened to Algol and PL/1 ?  Both languages featuring "modern" =20
concepts and with large amounts of vendor support?  Bliss?


> Then C had all the Libraries ...

C didn't have libraries to start with.  Sometimes I think its success =20
was due to NOT having libraries.  There were languages from those days =20
that had "all the libraries you'll ever need" built into the =20
language.  OS specific, of course.  And meaning that extensibility =20
beyond that was more difficult.   And portability was poor.  There was =20
a whole slew of mainframe and minicomputers that supported a bunch of =20
languages generally NOT including C (unless you were a university and =20
could get unix.)  It can be very enlightening (and painful) to look at =20
code from the early 90s when massive amounts of conditional =20
compilation were needed if you wanted your app to run on windows, sun, =20
hp, and AT&T unix...

Portability is probably why C won.  Not just portability of the code =20
itself.  Compilers used to be essentially sales tools for multi-=20
million dollar mainframes.  The big vendors spent LOTS of effort =20
making highly optimized Fortran and Cobol compilers, plus Algol and =20
Basic for schools, plus proprietary (?) languages to fix everything =20
(PL/1)  This "model" was not portable to the new world of "personal" =20
computers.  IBMs compilers were barely portable to an environment that =20
supported interactivity...  Many compilers weren't designed to be =20
portable to "small" or embedded computing environments.  Look at the =20
number of currently "popular" languages that are not very suitable for =20
small environments!

Ada is a fine example of a language definition aimed at the old model =20
of computer development/deployment, finished just in time for that =20
model to be pretty much broken.  "Sure IBM and DEC will spend millions =20
implementing these compilers.  They'll HAVE to!!"  Right.

Of course, we now have C# and Java; modern examples of major vendor-=20
implemented languages.
I'd class C# as making the same environment-specific mistakes as the =20
early efforts


> It was longer before other languages  had production quality =20
> compilers.

No.


> Pascal and  BASIC only meant originally for teaching

Yeah; I think a lot of the blame can be based on the groups that =20
developed "teaching languages" without paying enough attention to what =20
it would take to make the language generally useful in the real world.


> Of course AT&T attitude to ownership of UNIX and the University
> involvement is directly responsible for Free BSD, GNU, Linux and the
> rest of the last 30+ years of FOSS wheel re-inventing.

FOSS definitely helped C a lot, even before it was called that.  First =20
there was the portable C compiler, which lasted through the late =20
1980s.  Then there was gcc.

BillW

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