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I think the reason that C "became the default" is because people were productive using it. If the other languages were that much better then the B-based ones, w
by bigfishrunning 1y ago
I think the reason that C "became the default" is because people were productive using it. If the other languages were that much better then the B-based ones, wouldn't the people using them simply out compete the ones not using them?
- hnlmorg 1y agoDevelopers make contradictory productivity claims all the time. You see it with LLMs, strongly vs weakly typed languages, GC vs non-GC, React Native vs Kotin / Swift, JIT languages vs AOT languages, and so on and so forth. Back in the 80s and 90s the bigger concern was portability and cost of the compiler license, both of which C did better. C was closer to the metal than vanilla Pascal too. But commercial Pascal dialects supported pointers, inlined assembly, and everything else you needed to write low-level systems code. Which again comes back to C offering better portability and cheaper licenses.