3 ms·

What, you're saying that features that made sense for a programming language designed in the 70s don't make sense in 2018?

• nine_k 8y ago
  Note how it's not a feature of a programming language per se, but rather a detail of implementation of a common data structure. Likely strings not being their own type but being directly represented as `char[]` also looked elegant and commendably parsimonious back in the day. Can't blame people who worked on machines with 128 kilobytes of RAM for that. They likely did not expect that their well-meaning hacks will take over most of the computing world.
  • pjmlp 8y ago
    The people that worked in machines 10 years older than PDP-11 managed to have safer systems languages. Still being sold today as Unisys ClearPath mainframes.
  • berti 8y ago
    Plenty of systems still have less RAM than that (hint: microcontroller). Unsurprisingly they're overwhelmingly C.
    • pjmlp 8y ago
      Those systems also have Basic and Pascal compilers, when one bothers to look around. https://www.mikroe.com/compilers https://www.mikroe.com/compilers Also many of those micro-controllers are more powerful than the computers where we ran CP/M on, where we had plenty of system languages to choose from. They are have become overwhelmingly C due to synergy effects.