6 ms·

In the 1960s they already had languages such as Lisp, Fortran, Algol, Basic... Even Pascal is two years older than C, and ML also came out around that time. Th

by Thiez 3y ago

In the 1960s they already had languages such as Lisp, Fortran, Algol, Basic... Even Pascal is two years older than C, and ML also came out around that time. The statement "the alternative to C was assembly" is simply incorrect.

marcosdumay 3y ago
On practice those were either proprietary or required beefy machines that the people writing C couldn't get. On the limited environment where C got created, it was the only option. And everybody suddenly adopted that limited environment, because it was cheap. And then it improved until you could use any of those other languages, but at that point everybody was using C already.
- grumpyprole 3y ago
  IIRC, Mac OS Classic was written in Pascal, as were other operating systems. C just won the popularity contest.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    That was about a decade after C had already won.
    - grumpyprole 3y ago
      The Xerox Alto was early 70's and that GUI OS was written in Pascal. I always thought Pascal was better designed and less bizarre than C. Null terminated strings were particularly a bad idea.
      - marcosdumay 3y ago
        Oh, by 73. Impressive. I didn't know that. Still, that was a much more powerful machine than the ones people wrote C for. And when the cheap segment of those "fridge computers" became powerful enough to run whatever you wanted to put on it, people started using small workstations. And when those workstations became powerful enough, we got PCs. It's only when the PCs got powerful enough that we could start to ignore the compiler demands and go with whatever language fit us better. (The later reductions all were based on cross-compiling, so they don't matter here.)
        pjmlp 3y ago
        Go check the capabilities of systems written in high level languages like ESPOL and NEWP in 1961. Let not say that a 1961 system is more powerful than a PDP-11.
      - mcguire 3y ago
        "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language", Brian W. Kernighan, April 2, 1981: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-pascal.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-pas... One of the major problems, as I recall, was that Wirth's basic Pascal definition was very limited---the max 256 character strings, for example. So the makers of "production" Pascal compilers added extensions to do all of the things that you would want to do and unfortunately those extensions were all incompatible.
        pjmlp 3y ago
        A famous rant ignoring Pascal dialects, while C still lacked a standard and was a bunch of dialects all over the place.
        mcguire 3y ago
        I've never seen a C dialect, other than not supporting bit fields. The language was usually the same although the libraries were all over the place.
        pjmlp 3y ago
        Then you haven't used any C compilers during the CP/M, 8-bit and 16-bit days. Here are two, RatC, Small-C. Additionally what do you think GCC C is, in regards to K&R C and ANSI C?
      - pjmlp 3y ago
        Mesa not Pascal.
        grumpyprole 3y ago
        Yes apologies, I misremembered. Mesa is definitely a decendant of Pascal though, more like Modula-2. Very ahead of its time.
        pjmlp 3y ago
        Sorry for being a bit pedantic, it predates Modula-2, Niklaus Wirth got in contact with it during his first sabbatical at Xerox PARC, after returning to ETHZ Modula was born, and shortly thereafter Modula-2 and Lillth Workstation, with the OS written in Modula-2. Several years later, a similar encounter with Mesa's evolution, Mesa/Cedar, gave birth to Oberon. As for being ahead of its time, very much indeed. Many people relate to Smalltalk and Interlisp-D, and are unaware of strong typed systems programming at Xerox, with a tooling that only decades cater came to be. Mesa authors were quite adamant that in order to succeed, Mesa had to support comparable tooling to Smalltalk and Interlisp-D environments.
- StableAlkyne 3y ago
  Fortran predates C by over a decade, and dozens of compilers existed for it by the mid-60s. Much of that legacy code is still in use to this day in scientific computing. One example: John Pople won his Nobel prize for work he did (and implemented in Fortran) in computational chemistry - the prize was delayed until '98 but he did the work in the 60s. The software he commercialized it into, Gaussian, still gets releases to this day and remains one of the most popular computational chemistry packages. It's really dependent on which field you're in. Not all scientific computing requires a beefy computer, but for a very long time it (and I guess LISP) dominated scientific computing. That said, I think it's a very good point to bring up the network effect of using C - if I need to hire a developer in 1985, it's probably easier to find someone with industry (not academic) experience who knows C than it is to find someone who knows Fortran. I do kinda prefer Fortran to C though, it's so much cleaner to do math in. Maybe somewhere there's an alternate universe where IBM invented C and Bell invented Fortran to win the popularity war.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    I tried to get access to FORTRAN and it was just way too expensive and required machines that I would not have been able to get close to. C ran on anything from Atari STs, IBM PCs, Amiga's and any other machine that an ordinary person could get their hands on. The other mainstream language at the time was BASIC, comparable to the way PHP is viewed today by many. And with the advent of the 32 bit x86 era GCC and djgpp as well as early Linux systems really unlocked a lot of power. Before then you'd have to have access to a VAX or a fancy workstation to get that kind of performance out of PC hardware. It's funny how long it took for the 386 to become fully operational, many years after it was launched you had to jump through all kinds of hoops to be able to use the system properly, whereas on a 68K based system costing a tiny fraction that was considered completely normal.
    - StableAlkyne 3y ago
      My perspective is a bit biased by scientific computing, I do more of that than enterprise stuff (and Python has been fine for personal use). It's cool to see the perspective of someone who was around for the early stages of it though. How did people see Fortran back then - nowadays it's seen as outdated but fast, but was it seen as interesting, and what drove you to seek it out? Other side question if it's okay, I keep seeing references to VAXen around historical documents and usenet posts from the 80s and 90s, what made them special compared to other hardware you had back then?
jacquesm 3y ago
For practical purposes - involving real world constraints in memory size, cpu power and storage - C was the tool of choice, it ran on just about everything, allowed you to get half decent performance without having to resort to assembler and was extremely memory efficient compared to other languages. Compilers were affordable (Turbo C for instance, but also many others such as Mark Williams C) even for young people like me (young then...) and there was enough documentation to get you off the ground. Other languages may have been available (besides the ubiquitous BASIC, and some niche languages such as FORTH) but they were as a rule either academic, highly proprietary and very, very expensive. So that left C (before cfront was introduced). And we ran with it, everybody around was using C, there wasn't the enormous choice in languages that you have today, you either programmed in C or you were working in assembler for serious and time-critical work.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Modula-2 and Pascal dialects compilers were also quite affordable, many of which being sold by companies that were selling the same C compilers, there were even product packages to get all languages in one go. Easily proven by looking into computing magazine archives. So lets not distorce history.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    I'm not 'distorting history', I'm just relating what was practical. Yes, there was Modula-2 and yes there was Pascal. But both felt extremely academic and restricted. Pascal still lives on today in the form of Delphi, which has to be a record for being in continuous use as a complete environment. I even paid for both Pascal and Modula-2 on the BBC Micro but performance was just horrible compared to the BASIC that came with that machine in spite of being compiled, compilation took a long time, even for simple programs. Wirth's books were enlightening though and I took a lot of lessons and algorithms from them and ported them to C (some of those I'm still using today!).
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Yes you definitly are, given how Modula-2 and Pascal were widely adopted across the European continent, specially in demoscene circles in the PC and Amiga ecosystems. As if the BBC Micro was an example of the industry adoption at large during those days. Any Byte, Computer Shopper, DDJ, The C Users Journal (later The C/C++ Users Journal), Crash, Amiga Format, Input, PC Techniques, You Computer, Your Sinclair,... from 1980 - 1995 thereabouts, shows a different picture in article contents and ad sections, in terms of language adoption and available set of compilers being sold.
notacoward 3y ago
The fact that those things existed does not refute the GP's point. Many companies well into the 80s at least had programmers and codebases that had to be weaned away from assembly, despite the fact that higher-level alternatives had existed for a while. That's just empirical fact, regardless of the reasons. I myself started programming in 68K assembly on the original Mac because I couldn't afford a compiler and interpreted languages (there were at least Lisp and Forth) couldn't be used to write things like desk accessories. Remember, gcc wasn't always something one could just assume for any given platform. The original statement is correct; yours is not, because of limited perspective.
mcguire 3y ago
How many Lisp Machines did Texas Instruments sell? (I mean outside of that one lab at UT Austin.) :-) I'm talking about applications developers who came out of the small mainframe/minicomputer world of the 70s and into the workstation/microcomputer world of the 80s. They started with assembly, and prying them off of it was as hard as convincing engineers to use FORTRAN. Convincing those application developers to use a garbage collected language, Java, was hard in the 90s.

by Thiez 3y ago

marcosdumay 3y ago

On practice those were either proprietary or required beefy machines that the people writing C couldn't get. On the limited environment where C got created, it was the only option. And everybody suddenly adopted that limited environment, because it was cheap. And then it improved until you could use any of those other languages, but at that point everybody was using C already.

grumpyprole 3y ago
IIRC, Mac OS Classic was written in Pascal, as were other operating systems. C just won the popularity contest.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  That was about a decade after C had already won.
  - grumpyprole 3y ago
    The Xerox Alto was early 70's and that GUI OS was written in Pascal. I always thought Pascal was better designed and less bizarre than C. Null terminated strings were particularly a bad idea.
    - marcosdumay 3y ago
      Oh, by 73. Impressive. I didn't know that. Still, that was a much more powerful machine than the ones people wrote C for. And when the cheap segment of those "fridge computers" became powerful enough to run whatever you wanted to put on it, people started using small workstations. And when those workstations became powerful enough, we got PCs. It's only when the PCs got powerful enough that we could start to ignore the compiler demands and go with whatever language fit us better. (The later reductions all were based on cross-compiling, so they don't matter here.)
      - pjmlp 3y ago
        Go check the capabilities of systems written in high level languages like ESPOL and NEWP in 1961. Let not say that a 1961 system is more powerful than a PDP-11.
    - mcguire 3y ago
      "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language", Brian W. Kernighan, April 2, 1981: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-pascal.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/bwk-on-pas... One of the major problems, as I recall, was that Wirth's basic Pascal definition was very limited---the max 256 character strings, for example. So the makers of "production" Pascal compilers added extensions to do all of the things that you would want to do and unfortunately those extensions were all incompatible.
      - pjmlp 3y ago
        A famous rant ignoring Pascal dialects, while C still lacked a standard and was a bunch of dialects all over the place.
        mcguire 3y ago
        I've never seen a C dialect, other than not supporting bit fields. The language was usually the same although the libraries were all over the place.
        pjmlp 3y ago
        Then you haven't used any C compilers during the CP/M, 8-bit and 16-bit days. Here are two, RatC, Small-C. Additionally what do you think GCC C is, in regards to K&R C and ANSI C?
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Mesa not Pascal.
      - grumpyprole 3y ago
        Yes apologies, I misremembered. Mesa is definitely a decendant of Pascal though, more like Modula-2. Very ahead of its time.
        pjmlp 3y ago
        Sorry for being a bit pedantic, it predates Modula-2, Niklaus Wirth got in contact with it during his first sabbatical at Xerox PARC, after returning to ETHZ Modula was born, and shortly thereafter Modula-2 and Lillth Workstation, with the OS written in Modula-2. Several years later, a similar encounter with Mesa's evolution, Mesa/Cedar, gave birth to Oberon. As for being ahead of its time, very much indeed. Many people relate to Smalltalk and Interlisp-D, and are unaware of strong typed systems programming at Xerox, with a tooling that only decades cater came to be. Mesa authors were quite adamant that in order to succeed, Mesa had to support comparable tooling to Smalltalk and Interlisp-D environments.
StableAlkyne 3y ago
Fortran predates C by over a decade, and dozens of compilers existed for it by the mid-60s. Much of that legacy code is still in use to this day in scientific computing. One example: John Pople won his Nobel prize for work he did (and implemented in Fortran) in computational chemistry - the prize was delayed until '98 but he did the work in the 60s. The software he commercialized it into, Gaussian, still gets releases to this day and remains one of the most popular computational chemistry packages. It's really dependent on which field you're in. Not all scientific computing requires a beefy computer, but for a very long time it (and I guess LISP) dominated scientific computing. That said, I think it's a very good point to bring up the network effect of using C - if I need to hire a developer in 1985, it's probably easier to find someone with industry (not academic) experience who knows C than it is to find someone who knows Fortran. I do kinda prefer Fortran to C though, it's so much cleaner to do math in. Maybe somewhere there's an alternate universe where IBM invented C and Bell invented Fortran to win the popularity war.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  I tried to get access to FORTRAN and it was just way too expensive and required machines that I would not have been able to get close to. C ran on anything from Atari STs, IBM PCs, Amiga's and any other machine that an ordinary person could get their hands on. The other mainstream language at the time was BASIC, comparable to the way PHP is viewed today by many. And with the advent of the 32 bit x86 era GCC and djgpp as well as early Linux systems really unlocked a lot of power. Before then you'd have to have access to a VAX or a fancy workstation to get that kind of performance out of PC hardware. It's funny how long it took for the 386 to become fully operational, many years after it was launched you had to jump through all kinds of hoops to be able to use the system properly, whereas on a 68K based system costing a tiny fraction that was considered completely normal.
  - StableAlkyne 3y ago
    My perspective is a bit biased by scientific computing, I do more of that than enterprise stuff (and Python has been fine for personal use). It's cool to see the perspective of someone who was around for the early stages of it though. How did people see Fortran back then - nowadays it's seen as outdated but fast, but was it seen as interesting, and what drove you to seek it out? Other side question if it's okay, I keep seeing references to VAXen around historical documents and usenet posts from the 80s and 90s, what made them special compared to other hardware you had back then?

jacquesm 3y ago

For practical purposes - involving real world constraints in memory size, cpu power and storage - C was the tool of choice, it ran on just about everything, allowed you to get half decent performance without having to resort to assembler and was extremely memory efficient compared to other languages. Compilers were affordable (Turbo C for instance, but also many others such as Mark Williams C) even for young people like me (young then...) and there was enough documentation to get you off the ground. Other languages may have been available (besides the ubiquitous BASIC, and some niche languages such as FORTH) but they were as a rule either academic, highly proprietary and very, very expensive. So that left C (before cfront was introduced). And we ran with it, everybody around was using C, there wasn't the enormous choice in languages that you have today, you either programmed in C or you were working in assembler for serious and time-critical work.

pjmlp 3y ago
Modula-2 and Pascal dialects compilers were also quite affordable, many of which being sold by companies that were selling the same C compilers, there were even product packages to get all languages in one go. Easily proven by looking into computing magazine archives. So lets not distorce history.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  I'm not 'distorting history', I'm just relating what was practical. Yes, there was Modula-2 and yes there was Pascal. But both felt extremely academic and restricted. Pascal still lives on today in the form of Delphi, which has to be a record for being in continuous use as a complete environment. I even paid for both Pascal and Modula-2 on the BBC Micro but performance was just horrible compared to the BASIC that came with that machine in spite of being compiled, compilation took a long time, even for simple programs. Wirth's books were enlightening though and I took a lot of lessons and algorithms from them and ported them to C (some of those I'm still using today!).
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Yes you definitly are, given how Modula-2 and Pascal were widely adopted across the European continent, specially in demoscene circles in the PC and Amiga ecosystems. As if the BBC Micro was an example of the industry adoption at large during those days. Any Byte, Computer Shopper, DDJ, The C Users Journal (later The C/C++ Users Journal), Crash, Amiga Format, Input, PC Techniques, You Computer, Your Sinclair,... from 1980 - 1995 thereabouts, shows a different picture in article contents and ad sections, in terms of language adoption and available set of compilers being sold.

notacoward 3y ago

The fact that those things existed does not refute the GP's point. Many companies well into the 80s at least had programmers and codebases that had to be weaned away from assembly, despite the fact that higher-level alternatives had existed for a while. That's just empirical fact, regardless of the reasons. I myself started programming in 68K assembly on the original Mac because I couldn't afford a compiler and interpreted languages (there were at least Lisp and Forth) couldn't be used to write things like desk accessories. Remember, gcc wasn't always something one could just assume for any given platform. The original statement is correct; yours is not, because of limited perspective.

mcguire 3y ago

How many Lisp Machines did Texas Instruments sell? (I mean outside of that one lab at UT Austin.) :-) I'm talking about applications developers who came out of the small mainframe/minicomputer world of the 70s and into the workstation/microcomputer world of the 80s. They started with assembly, and prying them off of it was as hard as convincing engineers to use FORTRAN. Convincing those application developers to use a garbage collected language, Java, was hard in the 90s.