On 29 April 2016 at 15:09, Noel Chiappa <j...@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
> > From: Liam Proven > > > C is popular because C is popular. > > Yes, but that had to start somewhere. > > I think it _became_ popular for two reasons: i) it was 'the' language of > Unix, and Unix was so much better than 99% of the alternatives _at the time_ > that it grew like crazy, and ii) C was a lot better than many of the > alternatives _at the time it first appeared_ (for a number of reasons, which > I won't expand on unless there is interest). Unix was designed in a way which demanded that nearly every function (except for a few built-in ones in the shell) was implemented as a program. So to build a Unix system you built the kernel, that one's written in C, but that's not the important part - you also built the hundreds, and soon thousands of applications, all written in C. To be able to compile those "Unix tools" (usr/src/*) every C compiler had to confirm to a defacto standard in a way other language compilers didn't have to. Usually somebody defines a standard, and then everybody else will decide that it's not *that* important to follow the standard - let's improve it a bit here and there. That wouldn't work for C. To this day C is more standard than nearly everything else. Including C++, which doesn't have the same must-compile-all-old-source pressure. So, the way I see it is that C became incredibly popular not just because it's usable for a wide range of purposes, but even more because "C is C is C". -Tor
