4 ms·

You need to re-read the OP's linked article. It's not an academic paper or even anything like. It's. Notes. From. A. Presentation. It's not the entire histor

You need to re-read the OP's linked article. It's not an academic paper or even anything like. It's. Notes. From. A. Presentation. It's not the entire history of compiler languages and the lineages and branchings thereof which make Game of Thrones look like Jane and Dick. If you're going to spend four sentences speaking about a core language, that is still in active use, that the audience will have heard of then C is a far better goto language than any of the ones listed above. > All were used to write OS's on minimal hardware with more readability and safety than C. Awesome. That decade abended years ago. They are no longer germane to a discussion at a conference in 2015, unless you're deep diving in language lineage. Which the author clearly wasn't. Edit: my bad. It was seven sentences.

pjmlp 11y ago
That is all fine and dandy if the presenter didn't lie to the audience: "Before C there was assembly language...." Is clearly a misinformation given to the audience. Just because it wasn't a scientific paper doesn't make it less wrong. The presenter has clearly driven all in the audience that don't know better, that C was the first high level systems information programming language. Had he said that C was the systems programming language that won the hearts of the systems programmers we wouldn't be discussing this. This misinformation has been happening since the mid-90.
- drivingmenuts 11y ago
  ""Before C there was assembly language" is technically correct, unless you know something I'm unaware of. That there were other languages between those two isn't important in the context of creating an example in one presentation and it for-sure is not factually wrong. Just so we're absolutely crystal-clear here, how, exactly, would you have phrased the paragraph about C, without wandering off into the endless maze of computer language lineages, but keeping the same general intent, in the context of the remainder of the presentation?
  - pjmlp 11y ago
    It factually wrong because there were options to do programming without Assembly before C existed. One such example is the Burroughs B5000 system with Algol in 1961. This is just one example from many, available to anyone that cares to a little research. I would have phrase it like this: "Before C there were other systems programming languages, but for various reasons they lost to C and now it is widespread through the industry as we know it." Followed by his note on how all computers in the room have their OSes coded in C.
    - cwyers 11y ago
      Okay, but would phrasing it that way add ANYTHING to the point he's trying to make? Would it help explain his point? (And it's not factually wrong, you're just deliberately misreading it so you can flog the dead horse about the ancient lost civilizations of programming languages before C.)
      - pjmlp 11y ago
        It wouldn't fool his audience that C was the very first systems programming language to exist. However telling the truth is worthless, lost time and doesn't contribute to the learning of younger audiences. Please excuse me, I have some books to burn.
      - nickpsecurity 11y ago
        "C certainly wasn’t the first high level language, but it was one of the first to take portability seriously" That's totally wrong. The C philosophy and structure were almost 100% due to BCPL with minor changes. BCPL was portable by accident due to its simplicity. They just got rid of every good feature of a systems language to the point that the remainder, barely a language, could be put on about anything. Thompson tweaked BCPL into B to make it work on his terrible PDP-7. That wouldn't work on a PDP-11 so more tweaks by Ritchie into C. That couldn't even handle UNIX alpha so that added structs. That's C 1.0. A year later, people started porting it because it was barely a language & could fit in their hardware. All that was in my link about its history from documents and people that made it. http://pastebin.com/UAQaWuWG http://pastebin.com/UAQaWuWG "Before C there was assembly language" Also wrong and contradicting his claim about HLL's before C. As pjmlp listed, there were numerous systems languages in production before C was designed. It's not like we made a huge leap of faith into structured HLL with C. We actually cut out maintenance, reliability, readability, integration, etc capabilities of existing languages (esp CPL) to iterate into C. And, later on with good hardware, people started adding many of those back because C was garbage that led to all kinds of problems. We can certainly accept a need to learn C language and tooling for working with existing OS or app code. That's called legacy system effect. However, we should never push false justifications for that which detract from superior language design that would've enabled more robust, maintainable, productive development. We can accept both the what and the why of C at the same time. As a side effect, more people might explore features of C alternatives to build the next, best, systems language. Wirth has been doing that for years. Ada still gets updated with one version able to prove absence of many, runtime errors at compile time. Clojure is showing LISP's advantages and it was once used for OS's w/ incredible flexibility + robustness. So on and so forth. Gotta counter the C disinformation and misinformation so enough people know why they should do the opposite of it so some [more] eventually will. Note: There's also the value of removing inaccuracies in historical writings that have negative effects. Mere editing and revision. I hear that's important to some people, too.
nickpsecurity 11y ago
I think it's funny you disregard historical accuracy in a presentation about the legacy of a language where the author looks "at historical examples to set the stage" with an image of "the History of Programming Languages." You're really grasping at straws trying to argue actual truth or historical evidence aren't relevant in such a post. Worse, any reader reading such things would assume the person did some research on it. Then, from that point, almost everything the author says about C's history, purpose, and effect were wrong. The only thing correct is everything in the room at the time was written in C [probably]. Which is actually meaningless given it's a historical accident far as the language itself goes. So C's legacy is that most, mainstream OS's are written in C. The reason? Thompson and Ritchie used C for UNIX plus shared it with lots of people with poor hardware. That's it. It wasn't designed, it wasn't intentionally portable, it wasn't better than anything then or now... nothing really about C itself justified it sticking around. Purveying such myths makes people think it's technically superior and that we should keep investing into it and similar languages for system use. Very damaging myth. So, I counter it everywhere I see it. "If you're going to spend four sentences speaking about a core language, that is still in active use, that the audience will have heard of then C is a far better goto language than any of the ones listed above." I can bring up C without lying about it's history, portability, and so on. The author was probably mislead by others rather than intentionally doing it, though. Hence the need for these comments. "That decade abended years ago. They are no longer germane to a discussion at a conference in 2015, unless you're deep diving in language lineage." Many are still around, in commercial use, and some updated. Still better than C at robust, systems programming. I agree the author doesn't really need to go into them nor did I ask that in original comment. Just that any statements are accurate in a post about history and legacy. This is why I didn't gripe about "C++ also codified the ideas of zero-cost abstractions," which existed before C++. Yet, C++ brought them to widespread attention. Probably the author's intent and so no gripe from me. Didn't you consider the fact that I left the rest of the write-up alone in my comment? That it might be for a reason I had lazer-like focus on the inaccuracies in the C entry rather than attacking the presentation as a whole. I get what the article is about and that's why it should maintain historical accuracy more than most.

pjmlp 11y ago

That is all fine and dandy if the presenter didn't lie to the audience: "Before C there was assembly language...." Is clearly a misinformation given to the audience. Just because it wasn't a scientific paper doesn't make it less wrong. The presenter has clearly driven all in the audience that don't know better, that C was the first high level systems information programming language. Had he said that C was the systems programming language that won the hearts of the systems programmers we wouldn't be discussing this. This misinformation has been happening since the mid-90.

drivingmenuts 11y ago
""Before C there was assembly language" is technically correct, unless you know something I'm unaware of. That there were other languages between those two isn't important in the context of creating an example in one presentation and it for-sure is not factually wrong. Just so we're absolutely crystal-clear here, how, exactly, would you have phrased the paragraph about C, without wandering off into the endless maze of computer language lineages, but keeping the same general intent, in the context of the remainder of the presentation?
- pjmlp 11y ago
  It factually wrong because there were options to do programming without Assembly before C existed. One such example is the Burroughs B5000 system with Algol in 1961. This is just one example from many, available to anyone that cares to a little research. I would have phrase it like this: "Before C there were other systems programming languages, but for various reasons they lost to C and now it is widespread through the industry as we know it." Followed by his note on how all computers in the room have their OSes coded in C.
  - cwyers 11y ago
    Okay, but would phrasing it that way add ANYTHING to the point he's trying to make? Would it help explain his point? (And it's not factually wrong, you're just deliberately misreading it so you can flog the dead horse about the ancient lost civilizations of programming languages before C.)
    - pjmlp 11y ago
      It wouldn't fool his audience that C was the very first systems programming language to exist. However telling the truth is worthless, lost time and doesn't contribute to the learning of younger audiences. Please excuse me, I have some books to burn.
    - nickpsecurity 11y ago
      "C certainly wasn’t the first high level language, but it was one of the first to take portability seriously" That's totally wrong. The C philosophy and structure were almost 100% due to BCPL with minor changes. BCPL was portable by accident due to its simplicity. They just got rid of every good feature of a systems language to the point that the remainder, barely a language, could be put on about anything. Thompson tweaked BCPL into B to make it work on his terrible PDP-7. That wouldn't work on a PDP-11 so more tweaks by Ritchie into C. That couldn't even handle UNIX alpha so that added structs. That's C 1.0. A year later, people started porting it because it was barely a language & could fit in their hardware. All that was in my link about its history from documents and people that made it. http://pastebin.com/UAQaWuWG http://pastebin.com/UAQaWuWG "Before C there was assembly language" Also wrong and contradicting his claim about HLL's before C. As pjmlp listed, there were numerous systems languages in production before C was designed. It's not like we made a huge leap of faith into structured HLL with C. We actually cut out maintenance, reliability, readability, integration, etc capabilities of existing languages (esp CPL) to iterate into C. And, later on with good hardware, people started adding many of those back because C was garbage that led to all kinds of problems. We can certainly accept a need to learn C language and tooling for working with existing OS or app code. That's called legacy system effect. However, we should never push false justifications for that which detract from superior language design that would've enabled more robust, maintainable, productive development. We can accept both the what and the why of C at the same time. As a side effect, more people might explore features of C alternatives to build the next, best, systems language. Wirth has been doing that for years. Ada still gets updated with one version able to prove absence of many, runtime errors at compile time. Clojure is showing LISP's advantages and it was once used for OS's w/ incredible flexibility + robustness. So on and so forth. Gotta counter the C disinformation and misinformation so enough people know why they should do the opposite of it so some [more] eventually will. Note: There's also the value of removing inaccuracies in historical writings that have negative effects. Mere editing and revision. I hear that's important to some people, too.

nickpsecurity 11y ago

I think it's funny you disregard historical accuracy in a presentation about the legacy of a language where the author looks "at historical examples to set the stage" with an image of "the History of Programming Languages." You're really grasping at straws trying to argue actual truth or historical evidence aren't relevant in such a post. Worse, any reader reading such things would assume the person did some research on it. Then, from that point, almost everything the author says about C's history, purpose, and effect were wrong. The only thing correct is everything in the room at the time was written in C [probably]. Which is actually meaningless given it's a historical accident far as the language itself goes. So C's legacy is that most, mainstream OS's are written in C. The reason? Thompson and Ritchie used C for UNIX plus shared it with lots of people with poor hardware. That's it. It wasn't designed, it wasn't intentionally portable, it wasn't better than anything then or now... nothing really about C itself justified it sticking around. Purveying such myths makes people think it's technically superior and that we should keep investing into it and similar languages for system use. Very damaging myth. So, I counter it everywhere I see it. "If you're going to spend four sentences speaking about a core language, that is still in active use, that the audience will have heard of then C is a far better goto language than any of the ones listed above." I can bring up C without lying about it's history, portability, and so on. The author was probably mislead by others rather than intentionally doing it, though. Hence the need for these comments. "That decade abended years ago. They are no longer germane to a discussion at a conference in 2015, unless you're deep diving in language lineage." Many are still around, in commercial use, and some updated. Still better than C at robust, systems programming. I agree the author doesn't really need to go into them nor did I ask that in original comment. Just that any statements are accurate in a post about history and legacy. This is why I didn't gripe about "C++ also codified the ideas of zero-cost abstractions," which existed before C++. Yet, C++ brought them to widespread attention. Probably the author's intent and so no gripe from me. Didn't you consider the fact that I left the rest of the write-up alone in my comment? That it might be for a reason I had lazer-like focus on the inaccuracies in the C entry rather than attacking the presentation as a whole. I get what the article is about and that's why it should maintain historical accuracy more than most.