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I don't know exactly what the author is referring to, but I know that C is unique in that it will never go away. So long as new hardware primitives come into pl

I don't know exactly what the author is referring to, but I know that C is unique in that it will never go away. So long as new hardware primitives come into play, we will always need to return to the level of C to squeeze out performance. This will only become more and more true as the ascendancy of multicores continues. A buddy and I were thinking about it just the other day: could you even imagine a closer wrapper for assembly with comparable ratios of effort to level of control?

t1m 13y ago
Machine language won't go away either. It's just that the only people writing it are compilers. The article was more about: Python programmer meets C, C introduces him to malloc(), programmer falls in love with malloc, C gets jealous and in a fit of rage deallocates programmer. I think this extended love affair for C comes from the fact that it's the least-common-denominator in terms of what our OSes are written in. At some point everything has to make system calls that are using C calling conventions and data structures. It makes sense that the base layer of everything will be written in C. It's an historic anomaly, not some fundamental awesomeness of the language itself. That said, it's a fundamentally awesome language, especially to build OSes in, but that's tangential.