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A 70s schoolteacher invented C, one of the most influential coding languages
- bruce343434 5y agoInvented one of the predecessors of* Also: > And that’s just the legacy of C. It’s also an extremely fast and safe language Only if wielded properly, which can be very tedious to do and so many people don't.
- bradknowles 5y agoC is fast? Usually, but slow algorithms are slow in any language. C is safe? IMO, in the same way that fire is safe. Or maybe Napalm. Or nitroglycerin. But then my introduction to C was the original K&R, before the first ANSI C came out. Maybe magic happened afterwards and it suddenly became a safe language after ANSI C came out.
- ggm 5y agoBCPL was revolutionary. C was evolution in action. Describing him as a schoolteacher is slightly bizarre. Technically true at one stage in his life. He was also a brilliant computer scientist for many many years and died in 1975 still in his oxbridge CS career. He had stopped being a schoolteacher in 1951. Stracheys family includes Lytton Strachey who wrote a fantastic biography of Queen Victoria. Wiki notes he informed the M4 macro processor which is also a Unix utility and patented fundamental ideas behind multi access time-sharing which MIT acknowledged in their ground breaking deployments. This article doesn't do him justice. Read the wiki and judge for yourself. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Strachey https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Strachey