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> On top of that, there have been no competing systems programming languages until very recently There have been plenty. What has changed isn't the lack of com

> On top of that, there have been no competing systems programming languages until very recently There have been plenty. What has changed isn't the lack of competing languages, it's the discontent with C and C++. The Rust hype has coincided with the anti-C and anti-C++ hype and thus the "rewrite it in Rust" movement was born. But Rust wasn't even the first memory safe systems programming language, let alone first alternative to C (and neither was C the first systems programming language itself).

guerrilla 5y ago
I meant competitive and edited my post now to reflect that and I stand by it. I can only speak for myself with certainty but the benefits never outweighed the costs until more recent languages. If there were really alternatives then more things would have been written in them instead of in C or moving to higher-level languages.
- hnlmorg 5y ago
  > I meant competitive and edited my post now to reflect that and I stand by it. I can only speak for myself with certainty but the benefits never outweighed the costs until more recent languages but if there were really alternatives then more things would have been written in them instead of in C or moving to higher-level languages. You're now conflating "popular" with "better". What makes a language successful isn't always the same as what makes it better (eg there are countless examples of languages failing to gain significant traction (like Zig, Nim, OCaml, D, ) over other languages that had a large company backing it (like Rust did). Moreover, what makes a language "better" isn't going to be the same for everyone. Some crave simplicity so that the entire language can be memorised (like SPARK) whereas others crave complexity where they can chose the subset of features to support (like C++). Some like C-style braces, some like ALGOL style keywords (like Ada), some prefer S-Expressions (like LISP) and some people even prefer to go direct to assembly. We've seen operating systems built in Fortran, Pascal, LISP, Oberon and others so it's not even as if I'm making a theoretical point here.
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    > What makes a language successful isn't always the same as what makes it better. That's definitely true but I think the odds are that at least one of them would have succeeded if many of them really were competitive. They got a lot of chances.
    - hnlmorg 5y ago
      You've completely missed the point. Let's put it in other terms: if your point were true then Javascript wouldn't be the language of browsers. English (which is a mess of a language) wouldn't be the de facto international language. You cannot conflate "success" with "better". There are so many other factors at play (like money, company politics and which platforms that language is used on happened to luck their way into the mainstream...to name a few). My point being that the reasons for C's success was as much to do with external factors as it was to do with C itself. In fact in a parallel universe where Bell Labs didn't give UNIX source away and RMS wasn't born (thus wasn't around to create GNU and mandate C as the standard), I'd wager you'd be talking about an ALGOL-derived language (possibly SPARK) as "the best" with C as an academic curiosity; a footnote in history. Or maybe we'd all be writing LISP.
      - guerrilla 5y ago
        Please stop making accusations. It's obvious that being better is not a sufficient condition for being popular. It's obvious that C and JavaScript are popular now primarily due to entrenchment. I'm not saying that there were no "better" languages by the standards you mean. What I'm saying is that none of them were better enough. They needed to amass such a large number of pros so as to outweigh that one single con of not being the entrenched language for the niche that we're speaking about. This goes for ISAs too: We use x86 not because it's better or even good. It's because PowerPC (or whatever you prefer) and all those that were better were not better enough to outweigh the massive cost of losing backward compatability, training, habits, relevant capital and all of that. Maybe RISC V, paired with the right microarchitecture, actually does turn out to be so much better that the transition becomes worth that huge cost. We'll see. We will overcome C, JavaScript, x86 and all that but only once the contenders to displace them are just *that* much better. Many things have had the chance to do that and were better in many ways but not until recently has the balanced tipped, in my opinion.

guerrilla 5y ago

I meant competitive and edited my post now to reflect that and I stand by it. I can only speak for myself with certainty but the benefits never outweighed the costs until more recent languages. If there were really alternatives then more things would have been written in them instead of in C or moving to higher-level languages.

hnlmorg 5y ago
> I meant competitive and edited my post now to reflect that and I stand by it. I can only speak for myself with certainty but the benefits never outweighed the costs until more recent languages but if there were really alternatives then more things would have been written in them instead of in C or moving to higher-level languages. You're now conflating "popular" with "better". What makes a language successful isn't always the same as what makes it better (eg there are countless examples of languages failing to gain significant traction (like Zig, Nim, OCaml, D, ) over other languages that had a large company backing it (like Rust did). Moreover, what makes a language "better" isn't going to be the same for everyone. Some crave simplicity so that the entire language can be memorised (like SPARK) whereas others crave complexity where they can chose the subset of features to support (like C++). Some like C-style braces, some like ALGOL style keywords (like Ada), some prefer S-Expressions (like LISP) and some people even prefer to go direct to assembly. We've seen operating systems built in Fortran, Pascal, LISP, Oberon and others so it's not even as if I'm making a theoretical point here.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  > What makes a language successful isn't always the same as what makes it better. That's definitely true but I think the odds are that at least one of them would have succeeded if many of them really were competitive. They got a lot of chances.
  - hnlmorg 5y ago
    You've completely missed the point. Let's put it in other terms: if your point were true then Javascript wouldn't be the language of browsers. English (which is a mess of a language) wouldn't be the de facto international language. You cannot conflate "success" with "better". There are so many other factors at play (like money, company politics and which platforms that language is used on happened to luck their way into the mainstream...to name a few). My point being that the reasons for C's success was as much to do with external factors as it was to do with C itself. In fact in a parallel universe where Bell Labs didn't give UNIX source away and RMS wasn't born (thus wasn't around to create GNU and mandate C as the standard), I'd wager you'd be talking about an ALGOL-derived language (possibly SPARK) as "the best" with C as an academic curiosity; a footnote in history. Or maybe we'd all be writing LISP.
    - guerrilla 5y ago
      Please stop making accusations. It's obvious that being better is not a sufficient condition for being popular. It's obvious that C and JavaScript are popular now primarily due to entrenchment. I'm not saying that there were no "better" languages by the standards you mean. What I'm saying is that none of them were better enough. They needed to amass such a large number of pros so as to outweigh that one single con of not being the entrenched language for the niche that we're speaking about. This goes for ISAs too: We use x86 not because it's better or even good. It's because PowerPC (or whatever you prefer) and all those that were better were not better enough to outweigh the massive cost of losing backward compatability, training, habits, relevant capital and all of that. Maybe RISC V, paired with the right microarchitecture, actually does turn out to be so much better that the transition becomes worth that huge cost. We'll see. We will overcome C, JavaScript, x86 and all that but only once the contenders to displace them are just *that* much better. Many things have had the chance to do that and were better in many ways but not until recently has the balanced tipped, in my opinion.