On Thursday, September 10, 2015 at 6:18:39 AM UTC-6, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > On Thu, 10 Sep 2015 05:18 am, Chris Angelico wrote: > > On Thu, Sep 10, 2015 at 5:14 AM, Laura Creighton <l...@openend.se> wrote: > >> In a message of Thu, 10 Sep 2015 05:00:22 +1000, Chris Angelico writes: > >>>To get started, you need some other sort of kick. > >> > >> Having Brian Kernighan write a really nice book about you, helps a lot. > > > > It kinda does. And of course, it also helps to have a time machine, so > > you can launch your language when there are less languages around. > > Today, you compete for attention with myriad languages that simply > > didn't exist when C was introduced to an unsuspecting world. > > I don't think that's quite right. I think, if anything, there were more > languages in the 1970s than now, it's just that they tended to be > proprietary, maybe only running on a single vendor's machine. But even if > I'm mistaken, I think that there is near-universal agreement that the > single biggest factor in C's popularity and growth during the 1970s and 80s > is that it was tied so intimately to Unix, and Unix was taking over from > mainframes, VAX, etc.
The growth of C and Unix were mutually interdependent, one was not the cause of the other. A big factor in the growth of Unix was that it was portable to new hardware relatively easily, a portability made possible by C. I note that even today, 3 or 4 decades later, the availability of Python on a wide variety of platforms is made possible by C. I also doubt there were more programming languages around in the 1970s than now, on the grounds that there were far fewer people capable of writing a compiler or interpreter in those days, and there were far fewer tools to help, or easily accessible knowledge about how to do do it. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
