3 ms·
I mean, from the perspective of the time, was anything other than C really an option? It was a time when computers were outrageously compute and memory limited
by spott 3y ago
I mean, from the perspective of the time, was anything other than C really an option?
It was a time when computers were outrageously compute and memory limited, and it was the only language that didn’t have huge (at the time) compute and/or memory costs associated with using it. We weren’t ready for higher level languages at the time.
- wrs 3y agoPeople developing languages have the same computers as everybody else. It’s only a slight oversimplification to say that C won because Unix won. There were plenty of usable high-level languages, not to mention plenty of low-level languages besides C.
- wbl 3y agoLook up when common lisp was invented. Pascal was also widely used including on classic Apple machines, and the Alto implemented smalltalk. What lead to C dominating was the spread of Unix driven by Bell's legal constraints and then the BSD sockets implementation.
- peterfirefly 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesa_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesa_(programming_language) There were several similar languages that could have filled the same ecological niche. C was widely available and de facto standardized (with an existing body of code as a forcing function + the existence of pcc). The others were not.