22 May
2020
22 May
'20
3:51 p.m.
Awesome, looks like my theory was completely wrong. Here's what it looks
like to me, please correct me as needed.
C's popularity has 2 distinct phases.
1972-1987 Unix drove C. Writing a functional PCC for a particular
architecture was easy, but not unusually so compared to other languages at
the time.
1987- gcc made C uniquely free to compile, so people chose to write C
because it was free and already popular.
Perl also came out in 1987, and afaik that was always free, but C still
took off because there was so much room for multiple languages.
So, now Im curious about embedded systems. In my limited experience, every
"embedded system" I programmed for from 2002-2011 had C as its primary
language. After 2011, I stopped programming embedded systems, so I don't
know after that. Why was C so dominant in this space? Is it because adding
a backend to gcc was free, C was already well known, and C was sufficiently
performant?
Tyler
On Fri, May 22, 2020, 11:53 Tom Ivar Helbekkmo <tih(a)hamartun.priv.no> wrote:
Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu> writes:
I suspect the real reason for C's sucess was
the nature of the language.
When I first saw it (ca. 1976), it struck me as a quantum improvement
over
its contemporaries.
Paul Graham expressed it like this:
"It seems to me that there have been two really clean, consistent
models of programming so far: the C model and the Lisp model. These
two seem points of high ground, with swampy lowlands between them."
-tih
--
Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance
of Lisp. Lisp is the most important idea in computer science. --Alan Kay