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> Given the factors involved (private ownership of language resources, complex runtime putting minimum requirements on hardware, etc.), C and C++ might be the o

> Given the factors involved (private ownership of language resources, complex runtime putting minimum requirements on hardware, etc.), C and C++ might be the only two paths of least resistance for a critical era of the software industry. Maybe! We'll never know. I just don't think that rewriting history to be "C people were doers" is giving any meaningful context to language development, or how much was getting done in languages that were significantly safer.

shadowgovt 5y ago
I agree. The thing of interest here, I think, is the observation that language popularity is path-specific. JavaScript is just the worst, but everyone who does browser work has to know it because it happened to be the language clapped together to demo some nifty ideas for extending HTML and then those ideas stuck. Alternatives to JavaScript existed but were either privately-owned and therefore not trusted (vbscript) or too complicated to get off the ground (at some point, Mozilla had a fascinating proposal for HTML pages selecting features of the rendering engine and possibly even declaring that the whole page should be interpreted via user-definable code modules; had this won the day, you could write you web page in LaTeX for all anybody cared, but no-one was going to invest the time to write a dozen rendering agents when the HTML one was already expensive to develop and keep stable). "C people were doers" is probably reductive, but C and C++ had an alchemy of factors that made something like, say, LISP or Erlang not be where they are. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say the most dominant factors are the language runtime's portability, the language's features allowing for relatively low-level access to the backing hardware (i.e. the thinness of the abstraction between C memory access and microprocessor read-write instructions means things like memory maps or "magic addresses" that trigger hardware effects on mutation could just be handed to user code), and the compatibility of the runtime with what came to be (for a ton of reasons) a dominant model of computation in the commercial and consumer space: the x86 architecture.
- staticassertion 5y ago
  I would guess that a huge part of C's popularity is UNIX. I think a number of other languages could have easily competed in the other areas ie: thin abstraction.

shadowgovt 5y ago

I agree. The thing of interest here, I think, is the observation that language popularity is path-specific. JavaScript is just the worst, but everyone who does browser work has to know it because it happened to be the language clapped together to demo some nifty ideas for extending HTML and then those ideas stuck. Alternatives to JavaScript existed but were either privately-owned and therefore not trusted (vbscript) or too complicated to get off the ground (at some point, Mozilla had a fascinating proposal for HTML pages selecting features of the rendering engine and possibly even declaring that the whole page should be interpreted via user-definable code modules; had this won the day, you could write you web page in LaTeX for all anybody cared, but no-one was going to invest the time to write a dozen rendering agents when the HTML one was already expensive to develop and keep stable). "C people were doers" is probably reductive, but C and C++ had an alchemy of factors that made something like, say, LISP or Erlang not be where they are. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say the most dominant factors are the language runtime's portability, the language's features allowing for relatively low-level access to the backing hardware (i.e. the thinness of the abstraction between C memory access and microprocessor read-write instructions means things like memory maps or "magic addresses" that trigger hardware effects on mutation could just be handed to user code), and the compatibility of the runtime with what came to be (for a ton of reasons) a dominant model of computation in the commercial and consumer space: the x86 architecture.

staticassertion 5y ago
I would guess that a huge part of C's popularity is UNIX. I think a number of other languages could have easily competed in the other areas ie: thin abstraction.