5 ms·

I try to always understand the current state of things in the context of how they were before the current state. C and Unix came on to the scene - and they wer

I try to always understand the current state of things in the context of how they were before the current state. C and Unix came on to the scene - and they were much much better than what came before. Users were meant to use the shell commands + awk and get a whole lot done with that. C programs were meant to be small. How small? Well - how much code would you be able to write using ed? I think Unix intended for programmers to develop languages for users - use lex and yacc to come up with something to hand off to users. The Unix operating system assumed a corporate org structure that just does not exist. Genius programmers and highly educated users. https://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0 https://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0 <--- this is what they were expecting If we went back in time to tell them how real corporations would be set up, I think C would have had safe defaults that could be disabled when needed and syntax closer to Go than C. In fact if we told them how things would be in 40 years, they would have settled on the erlang VM for stuff outside of systems and graphics programming.

pjmlp 4y ago
C and Unix came on to the scene and they were free beer (for all pratical purposes), so they won over the other stuff that cost lots of green paper. Had AT&T been allowed to profit from their Bell Labs research projects, and history would have been quite different, as proven when they went after Lions commentary book and BSD, shortly after been allowed again to profit from their research.
- flohofwoe 4y ago
  UNIX was completely irrelevant/unreachable for most people until Linux showed up. By that time, C was already popular outside the UNIX world.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Nope, it was what most companies and universities were using in their compute centers, when not using MS-DOS with Novell Netware.
  - nine_k 4y ago
    I don't know about most of the people. What may have mattered was easy access to Unix for students in universities. You would normally expect there some VAXen, Sun hardware, and even PDPs, all running Unix. Had AT&T made Plan 9 available in equally relaxed terms, history might have gone differently, too.
  - flomo 4y ago
    University site licenses for UNIX were very inexpensive. UNIX/C was way more accessible than most competitors, and students took that experience out to the real world.
  - tialaramex 4y ago
    "Most people" don't matter here. The girl who bags your shopping doesn't need to know what UNIX® is for C to take over the world, but the guy who wrote Commander Keen (and who will go on to write Doom and Quake) does. For example in Spring 1991, with Linux still just some C code Linus Torvalds was thinking of naming Freax if he got it working, JANET, the organisation providing network access to the UK's universities (via X.25 of course) decides to launch JIPS, an experimental IP network. JIPS was huge. Why was JIPS huge? Because unlike X.25 you could just download BSD source spin up a Unix with TCP/IP and run everything you could think of or write your own software, you don't need anybody's permission - there's some guy at CERN who has written a "Web browser" which sounds pretty interesting for instance. By the time Torvalds writes his Linux 0.0.1 announcement email, JIPS is the dominant use of JANET and X.25 is on its way to deprecation. It was all bundled together with this free software I got, 100% legit. It seems to work pretty good, and unless you've got funding from somewhere to use something different I think we should use C / IP / Unix.

pjmlp 4y ago

C and Unix came on to the scene and they were free beer (for all pratical purposes), so they won over the other stuff that cost lots of green paper. Had AT&T been allowed to profit from their Bell Labs research projects, and history would have been quite different, as proven when they went after Lions commentary book and BSD, shortly after been allowed again to profit from their research.

flohofwoe 4y ago
UNIX was completely irrelevant/unreachable for most people until Linux showed up. By that time, C was already popular outside the UNIX world.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Nope, it was what most companies and universities were using in their compute centers, when not using MS-DOS with Novell Netware.
- nine_k 4y ago
  I don't know about most of the people. What may have mattered was easy access to Unix for students in universities. You would normally expect there some VAXen, Sun hardware, and even PDPs, all running Unix. Had AT&T made Plan 9 available in equally relaxed terms, history might have gone differently, too.
- flomo 4y ago
  University site licenses for UNIX were very inexpensive. UNIX/C was way more accessible than most competitors, and students took that experience out to the real world.
- tialaramex 4y ago
  "Most people" don't matter here. The girl who bags your shopping doesn't need to know what UNIX® is for C to take over the world, but the guy who wrote Commander Keen (and who will go on to write Doom and Quake) does. For example in Spring 1991, with Linux still just some C code Linus Torvalds was thinking of naming Freax if he got it working, JANET, the organisation providing network access to the UK's universities (via X.25 of course) decides to launch JIPS, an experimental IP network. JIPS was huge. Why was JIPS huge? Because unlike X.25 you could just download BSD source spin up a Unix with TCP/IP and run everything you could think of or write your own software, you don't need anybody's permission - there's some guy at CERN who has written a "Web browser" which sounds pretty interesting for instance. By the time Torvalds writes his Linux 0.0.1 announcement email, JIPS is the dominant use of JANET and X.25 is on its way to deprecation. It was all bundled together with this free software I got, 100% legit. It seems to work pretty good, and unless you've got funding from somewhere to use something different I think we should use C / IP / Unix.