6 ms·

This kind of comments are forgetting all the good that C did bring in the last 50 years of computer history. <sarcasm>Too bad those shitty engineers in the 70s

by linkdd 6y ago

This kind of comments are forgetting all the good that C did bring in the last 50 years of computer history. <sarcasm>Too bad those shitty engineers in the 70s didn't think of Rust...</sarcasm>

miohtama 6y ago
They thought many ideas of it (see Lisp, Smalltalk) but computers where not powerful enough for complex compilers. Instead, the burden of ensuring correctness had to be left as the cognitive burden for the developer for decades to come.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  > They thought many ideas of it (see Lisp, Smalltalk) but computers where not powerful enough for complex compilers. That's probably true for borrower-checking specifically, but I don't think it accounts for all language-design breakthroughs. There were decades between the development of functional programming languages, and widespread hybrid languages which incorporated those ideas (e.g. modern Python and C#).
- pjmlp 6y ago
  See Burroughs B5500, created in 1961 with ESPOL/NEWP, 10 years before C was even an idea.
jabl 6y ago
> <sarcasm>Too bad those shitty engineers in the 70s didn't think of Rust...</sarcasm> True, Rust didn't exist back then, and yes, some (few!) features in Rust weren't invented and worked out then, like the ownership model. OTOH the corollary to that statement isn't that C was some shining beacon of good design taking advantage of the then state of the art programming language knowledge. See e.g. https://pastebin.com/UAQaWuWG https://pastebin.com/UAQaWuWG
- rualca 6y ago
  That pastebin leaves out the fact that C's spartan approach and extreme simplicity allowed C to become the most popular programming language in the world already in the time of K&R, a book still renowned for it's clarity and low mental baggage required to onboard onto a programming language. The pastebin also left out that Bjarne Stroustrup developed C with classes, and the C, as a backward compatible superset of C to take advantage of C's unrivaled popularity. We all can agree that the science and art behind programming language design progressed a lot in the four decades where we enjoyed C. However, it feels a kin to rewriting history to depict C as a subpar language that was poorly designed and had little to no redeeming qualities, when facts speak for themselves.
  - titzer 6y ago
    C was not extremely simple. Lisp was extremely simple.
    - Koshkin 6y ago
      Problem was, real world programming in Lisp was not simple.
      - ku-man 6y ago
        "Problem is, real world programming in Lisp is not simple" is also correct.
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        Just like real world programming in C is hardly memory corruption free, and only around 10% of survey answers keep asserting to use any kind of memory assurance tooling.
        jabl 6y ago
        The other 90% are the better than average programmers who don't need such training wheels. /s
mhh__ 6y ago
Adding slices to C would kill a lot of bugs without going all the way to rust.
titzer 6y ago
No one can seriously argue that C's language design was inherently advantageous over, say, Pascal. If Lisp, ML, Simula, Algol, or Ada received the amount of optimization and porting investment that C did, history would be very different. C succeeded because a.) Unix, and b.) there were a zillion platforms with a zillion different compilers that could process something like C. They all did weird things and you couldn't actually write portable code for decades, but you could kind of fake it.
- refenestrator 6y ago
  That portability to a zillion platforms was part of the language design, though. 'Portable assembler' and all that.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    All high level languages are portable, and many already were before C came to be. Just marketing speak.
    - refenestrator 6y ago
      Sure, with more or less effort. C's semantics seem very easy to port, with very little abstraction over the commonalities that all (most?) assemblies share: computer as a giant array with a CPU and registers. There's a gaping hole in the abstraction when it comes to word size, but that's about it, and it's obvious to diagnose at least. Compared to the list of languages above with their more advanced features, it's super easy to port a C compiler and start compiling code. Worse is better.
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        So easy that to actually make C portable, UNIX had to be made into a C standard library via POSIX, otherwise portable C code is basically just logic and data structures.
        6y ago
agumonkey 6y ago
Actually I'd bet a dollar or two that linear threading of resources existed even before C, it just wasn't neither a common practice nor a theoretical framework at the time.
pjmlp 6y ago
Like the Go designers ignored generics, they ignored the safer systems programming languages developed as ALGOL and PL/I variants during the 60s. https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html

by linkdd 6y ago

This kind of comments are forgetting all the good that C did bring in the last 50 years of computer history. <sarcasm>Too bad those shitty engineers in the 70s didn't think of Rust...</sarcasm>

miohtama 6y ago

They thought many ideas of it (see Lisp, Smalltalk) but computers where not powerful enough for complex compilers. Instead, the burden of ensuring correctness had to be left as the cognitive burden for the developer for decades to come.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
> They thought many ideas of it (see Lisp, Smalltalk) but computers where not powerful enough for complex compilers. That's probably true for borrower-checking specifically, but I don't think it accounts for all language-design breakthroughs. There were decades between the development of functional programming languages, and widespread hybrid languages which incorporated those ideas (e.g. modern Python and C#).
pjmlp 6y ago
See Burroughs B5500, created in 1961 with ESPOL/NEWP, 10 years before C was even an idea.

jabl 6y ago

> <sarcasm>Too bad those shitty engineers in the 70s didn't think of Rust...</sarcasm> True, Rust didn't exist back then, and yes, some (few!) features in Rust weren't invented and worked out then, like the ownership model. OTOH the corollary to that statement isn't that C was some shining beacon of good design taking advantage of the then state of the art programming language knowledge. See e.g. https://pastebin.com/UAQaWuWG https://pastebin.com/UAQaWuWG

rualca 6y ago
That pastebin leaves out the fact that C's spartan approach and extreme simplicity allowed C to become the most popular programming language in the world already in the time of K&R, a book still renowned for it's clarity and low mental baggage required to onboard onto a programming language. The pastebin also left out that Bjarne Stroustrup developed C with classes, and the C, as a backward compatible superset of C to take advantage of C's unrivaled popularity. We all can agree that the science and art behind programming language design progressed a lot in the four decades where we enjoyed C. However, it feels a kin to rewriting history to depict C as a subpar language that was poorly designed and had little to no redeeming qualities, when facts speak for themselves.
- titzer 6y ago
  C was not extremely simple. Lisp was extremely simple.
  - Koshkin 6y ago
    Problem was, real world programming in Lisp was not simple.
    - ku-man 6y ago
      "Problem is, real world programming in Lisp is not simple" is also correct.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      Just like real world programming in C is hardly memory corruption free, and only around 10% of survey answers keep asserting to use any kind of memory assurance tooling.
      - jabl 6y ago
        The other 90% are the better than average programmers who don't need such training wheels. /s

mhh__ 6y ago

Adding slices to C would kill a lot of bugs without going all the way to rust.

titzer 6y ago

No one can seriously argue that C's language design was inherently advantageous over, say, Pascal. If Lisp, ML, Simula, Algol, or Ada received the amount of optimization and porting investment that C did, history would be very different. C succeeded because a.) Unix, and b.) there were a zillion platforms with a zillion different compilers that could process something like C. They all did weird things and you couldn't actually write portable code for decades, but you could kind of fake it.

refenestrator 6y ago
That portability to a zillion platforms was part of the language design, though. 'Portable assembler' and all that.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  All high level languages are portable, and many already were before C came to be. Just marketing speak.
  - refenestrator 6y ago
    Sure, with more or less effort. C's semantics seem very easy to port, with very little abstraction over the commonalities that all (most?) assemblies share: computer as a giant array with a CPU and registers. There's a gaping hole in the abstraction when it comes to word size, but that's about it, and it's obvious to diagnose at least. Compared to the list of languages above with their more advanced features, it's super easy to port a C compiler and start compiling code. Worse is better.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      So easy that to actually make C portable, UNIX had to be made into a C standard library via POSIX, otherwise portable C code is basically just logic and data structures.
      - 6y ago

agumonkey 6y ago

Actually I'd bet a dollar or two that linear threading of resources existed even before C, it just wasn't neither a common practice nor a theoretical framework at the time.

pjmlp 6y ago

Like the Go designers ignored generics, they ignored the safer systems programming languages developed as ALGOL and PL/I variants during the 60s. https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html