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It feels much too pragmatic for my taste. C was unprincipled and pragmatic too, it was created with the goal of making UNIX portable. Still, C became one of th

It feels much too pragmatic for my taste. C was unprincipled and pragmatic too, it was created with the goal of making UNIX portable. Still, C became one of the most popular and influential languages. While I prefer ADTs/generics too, let's not forget that many people are less principled and pragmatic factors influence language choice as much (toolchain, ecosystem, popularity, familiarity).

pjmlp 11y ago
> Still, C became one of the most popular and influential languages. That was a side effect of successful startups (Sun, SGI...) adopting UNIX as their OS.
- danieldk 11y ago
  The success of UNIX is inseparable from C and vice versa. C made UNIX one of the first portable operating systems and, by virtue of being low-level, provided performance.
  - pjmlp 11y ago
    The same could be said of OSes using Algol and Mesa. They just hadn't successful startups using them.
    - danieldk 11y ago
      There are good reasons that these startups weren't using OSes using Algol and Mesa. You seem to imply that the success of C and Unix is some historical accident as a result of two startups picking Unix randomly, and their choice was bit a function of the technical properties of UNIX and C. Which, is of course, nonsense. Sun used Unix because Sun was co-founded by Bill Joy. By that time, Joy was already deeply involved in Unix (per BSD). If he didn't find Unix and C likeable and up to the task, they would have made different choices. SGI and Sun were just one of many catalyzers, like a lot of programming languages have catalyzers.
      - pjmlp 11y ago
        You just confirmed what I said. The startups that have chosen UNIX, did so because the owners were part of the American UNIX university culture. A different background would have mean a very different history in mainstream OSes and their respective system programming languages. In Europe C had very little meaning until most enterprises started to replace their mainframes by UNIX servers from those companies.
- kayamon 11y ago
  Having had exposure to both C and Pascal at around the sane time, I vastly preferred working in C. I do think there's something intrinsically good about it compared to other contemporary systems languages - I don't think it's just that it tagged along with Unix.

pjmlp 11y ago

> Still, C became one of the most popular and influential languages. That was a side effect of successful startups (Sun, SGI...) adopting UNIX as their OS.

danieldk 11y ago
The success of UNIX is inseparable from C and vice versa. C made UNIX one of the first portable operating systems and, by virtue of being low-level, provided performance.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  The same could be said of OSes using Algol and Mesa. They just hadn't successful startups using them.
  - danieldk 11y ago
    There are good reasons that these startups weren't using OSes using Algol and Mesa. You seem to imply that the success of C and Unix is some historical accident as a result of two startups picking Unix randomly, and their choice was bit a function of the technical properties of UNIX and C. Which, is of course, nonsense. Sun used Unix because Sun was co-founded by Bill Joy. By that time, Joy was already deeply involved in Unix (per BSD). If he didn't find Unix and C likeable and up to the task, they would have made different choices. SGI and Sun were just one of many catalyzers, like a lot of programming languages have catalyzers.
    - pjmlp 11y ago
      You just confirmed what I said. The startups that have chosen UNIX, did so because the owners were part of the American UNIX university culture. A different background would have mean a very different history in mainstream OSes and their respective system programming languages. In Europe C had very little meaning until most enterprises started to replace their mainframes by UNIX servers from those companies.
kayamon 11y ago
Having had exposure to both C and Pascal at around the sane time, I vastly preferred working in C. I do think there's something intrinsically good about it compared to other contemporary systems languages - I don't think it's just that it tagged along with Unix.