If memory serves... Microsoft for first few version of DOS used
assembler. This proved expensive for Microsoft as the number of
people willing to program in intel assembler was quite limited.
Microsoft kept hearing about this C programming language which
students at MS were talking about. It was essentially free and the
number of people willing to program was high, and their cost (because
they were students) was low. Microsoft converted to C.
The reasons that C was popular was quite simple. It was free to
universities and colleges so professors did not have to pay compiler
licenses to IBM, Xerox, Control Data, etc. This made it quite popular
with faculty. C requires little or no discipline to program in. So
the typical zit faced 18 year old socially outcast student loved it as
well. The perfect eco-system :)
So like many things that originate from US (but not all) it was the
law of the cheapest solution. So today we have C, C++, and Java (a
toilet trained version of C++) to use.
</Step_off_soap_box>
On 2009-10-16, at 12:58 PM, Jürgen Hestermann wrote:
You can post an ad for a C programmer and get 1,000 applicants, if
you post an ad for a Pascal programmer you might get 5, at least
where I live.
Yes, that maybe true. But how has all this started? As far as I
know, C was not that popular in past (at least not on Windows).
Instead (Turbo) Pascal was a widely used language. Suddenly this
turned. May have come from Linux, where C was standard. I don't know.
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