> Can you explain why Algol-68 and PL/I didn't generate any network effects? The community was too small. The grows in the programming field was very rapid. I

> Can you explain why Algol-68 and PL/I didn't generate any network effects? The community was too small. The grows in the programming field was very rapid. I don't want to say "exponential" because I don't have the actual numbers, but you could see it because, well, you would almost never meet anyone with more than some 5 years of experience in almost any programming field for decades, i.e. in 70's, 80's, 90's... I started my career in the 90's, and, so far, in real life, I only met three programmers who started more than 10 years before my time. The new generation of programmers simply didn't know much of what the previous generation did, and this repeated many times over, not just with Algol or PL/I. > C may have survived for over 50 years because of network effects. But it didn't get in the position to have network effects by being "awful inside and out". I don't know how much do you know about UNIX history, but you are willfully misquoting me. Literally, the success of UNIX, and by proxy, of C is the network effect. In a more literal sense than you probably imagine. The appeal of UNIX was more or less this: the "real" computers of the day, the so-called "big iron" had always custom-made operating systems for them. Essentially, every different hardware model would ship with a different OS. UNIX was the first portable OS in a sense that you could install it on more than one CPU architecture (not from the very start, but that was the goal, and they succeeded at it). And the reason why people wanted a portable OS was the idea behind how they wanted to build networks back in those days: have a "real big-iron" have a "side-kick" computer that handles the networking issues. The side-kicks would all run the same system, and serve as adapters to "real" computers. UNIX, in a sense, was a glorified router modem... at least, that's what it was meant to be. Quite soon programmers realized that instead of connecting "side-kick" computers to "real" computers they may make "real" computers run the same standardized OS. A much simpler one at that! Very little thought was put into thinking about why those systems on "real" computers had to be so complex and big. The same kind of enthusiast who proclaimed that Emacs is huge, but ended up using Eclipse, or the same enthusiasts who proclaimed that Ada is huge, but ended up using C++ are the shortsighted programmers who promoted UNIX in its early days, fullheartedly believing that complexity will somehow evaporate, that they are getting a simple tool to solve complex problems... So, yeah, because UNIX did became popular due to network effect, literally and figuratively. C just piggy-backed on its success.*