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> What helped C was exactly the same as what made JavaScript sucessful, it came with a free beer platform (UNIX). Your saying that reminds me of this: https:/

by msla 4y ago

> What helped C was exactly the same as what made JavaScript sucessful, it came with a free beer platform (UNIX). Your saying that reminds me of this: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/programming/CTriumph https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/programming/CTriump... > This significantly understates the real appeal of C at the time, even and especially to people who had alternative languages. A great illustration of this is C on the early Macintosh. You see, unlike environments like MS-DOS (which had no language associated with it, just assembler), the early Macintosh systems already had a programming language; they were designed to be programmed in Pascal (and the Mac ROMs were originally written in Pascal before being converted to assembler). > This was more than just an issue of Apple's suggested language being Pascal instead of C. The entire Mac API was designed around Pascal calling conventions and various Pascal data structures; it really was a Pascal API. Programming a Mac in C involved basically swimming upstream against this API, full of dealing with things like non-C strings (if I remember right, Mac ROM strings were one byte length plus data). [snip] > Despite all of this, C crushed Pascal to become by far the dominant programming language on the Macintosh. [snip] C was enough better to displace Pascal in a hostile environment. > C did not win just because it was at the right place at the right time. C won in significant part because it was (and is) a genuinely good language for the job it does. As a result it was the language that a lot of pragmatic people picked if you gave them anything like a choice. UNIX and C certainly helped each other spread (UNIX helped C because if you wanted UNIX, you got C; C helped UNIX because porting an OS which isn't a few thousand kilobytes of assembly is easier than porting one which is) but C could spread just fine without UNIX going along with it.

pjmlp 4y ago
That is all good and well, except what crushed Object Pascal on Mac OS was C++, with App Toolbox C++ port and Metrowerks PowerPlant, hardly anyone was doing anything that serious with C instead of C++ on the Mac. Newton OS (after Dylan lost to C++ on Newton), Taligent, and Copland were also written in C++. Whereas on the PC world, C was mostly used to port UNIX stuff, and being the low level underpinings of Windows and OS/2, while application software made use of OWL, MFC, CSet++,... Hence why BeOS also went down the C++ path instead of C. In a way it is kind of ironic, as C++ was also born as a UNIX language, adopted by major desktop OS vendors, although many mistakenly assume Microsoft was the main cause for its adoption.

by msla 4y ago

pjmlp 4y ago

That is all good and well, except what crushed Object Pascal on Mac OS was C++, with App Toolbox C++ port and Metrowerks PowerPlant, hardly anyone was doing anything that serious with C instead of C++ on the Mac. Newton OS (after Dylan lost to C++ on Newton), Taligent, and Copland were also written in C++. Whereas on the PC world, C was mostly used to port UNIX stuff, and being the low level underpinings of Windows and OS/2, while application software made use of OWL, MFC, CSet++,... Hence why BeOS also went down the C++ path instead of C. In a way it is kind of ironic, as C++ was also born as a UNIX language, adopted by major desktop OS vendors, although many mistakenly assume Microsoft was the main cause for its adoption.