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The connection with Unix was indeed a huge factor in the popularization of C. About Ada, it is actually a decade newer than C. In 1982 I was part of a group th
by jecel 6y ago
The connection with Unix was indeed a huge factor in the popularization of C.
About Ada, it is actually a decade newer than C. In 1982 I was part of a group that was keeping track of its development and had learned C from old Bell Journals. I was able to a buy a book on Ada and the famous K&R C book and decided I preferred simplicity, so I donated the Ada book and dropped out of the study group. It is ironic that the even more complex (than Ada) C++ was what eventually became popular.
- BrendanEich 6y agoC history: https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html Ada history: https://www.adahome.com/History/ https://www.adahome.com/History/ FYI, I worked on a self-hosted Ada compiler as a grad student intern at Rolm (the Mil-Spec computer side, not the digital PBX side) in the summer of 1984.
- csb6 6y agoVery cool! I’ve used Ada in my spare time, and it has a lot of good features that I wish C-family languages had (like strong typedefs, no implicit conversions, better ways to do things than passing pointers around, arrays that don't decay into pointers, and types constrained to ranges). It is a lot more complex than C, but it feels a lot easier to read, and while it takes longer to write (for me) than C, it has a lot fewer weird edge cases/quirks to it than C does. It also seems to have more powerful ways to set the exact machine representation of types than C.