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Comment by nec4b | Hacker News Reader

You do realize there is a lot of C code out there which has nothing to do with UNIX. Although I do remember when you once claimed C requires UNIX like OS to run. :)

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UNIX is to C like the Web is to JavaScript.

JavaScript also runs outside of the browser nowadays, so what.

I don't know what are you trying to say? How does this follow from the parent post?

It follows that the Web made JavaScript unavoidable, then nodejs made it available everywhere else.

Likewise UNIX made C unavoidable in systems programming for timesharing servers, eventually like JavaScript outgrew the browser, certain people wanted to run C in their microcomputers.

I don't disagree with you on C being popular because of UNIX. I do disagree if you believe this is the only reason why it still enjoys popularity. And you are selling the UNIX authors short if you think they chose C just for the fun of it.

The UNIX authors didn't choose C; they made it, specifically to make UNIX. And, much like the original UNIX itself, it was a hack - because they were trying to make do within the limits of their hardware. So, some of the syntax is the way it is because it was simpler to parse, for example. And some of the semantics was originally "because PDP does that".

As for why C has staying power, that's solely a function of its early success. There's nothing about the language itself that isn't better provided for by some of its historic competitors (e.g. Modula-2). But there's a self-reinforcing loop here, where all new hardware platforms start with C as a basis because it lets you write all the existing code; and conversely, using C is the way to ensure that your code will work even on future platforms.

You're hung up on words. I know they made it. It was based of Ken Thomson's B. They chose it, when they could have taken some other existing language. I see great beauty and simplicity in C the same way I see it e.g. in Lisp or Javascript for that matter. I dabbled in Modula-2 and it does not offer the same feeling in my opinion. The core features of C are very powerful and simple at the same time, which is the reason it stayed popular. People writing low level code understand that.

The core features of Modula-2 are largely the same as C + modules, but with more consistent syntax and fewer footguns (like no unsafe implicit pointer conversions), so I don't see how C can objectively possess "great beauty and simplicity" in comparison. Unless you're referring specifically to the syntax?

B was also written as a hack - it was basically a minimal subset of BCPL small enough to fit in the memory of the machines they were working with. B is elegant in a sense that it's a very simple language for a word-oriented architecture - but that's exactly the part that they had to get rid of for C to target byte-oriented ones. Coincidentally, it's also one of the sources of weirdness in C syntax (e.g. implicit int and K&R prototypes are all legacy of B).

Claiming something is not beautiful because it is "hacky" on HN is a bit unexpected.

For me this is beautiful:

https://briancallahan.net/blog/20220220.html

I'm sure it's just a hack to you, but you can't do that in Pascal.

I mostly like C because of what I wrote here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30404529

"Hacked together" can mean different things. In this case, it means something slapped together on short notice with limited resources. Such things rarely tend to be beautiful. Beautiful hacks absolutely exist, but they are never hacked together in this sense.

The only thing your blog post demonstrates is that C has a built-in textual macro facility. But if you wanted the same in Pascal, you could have it just the same, by running it through the C preprocessor; or better yet, something more powerful like M4. Of course, you'd have to deal with various impedance mismatches, such as the fact that the definition of "token" is different between the preprocessor and the compiler - but that's also true of C! In fact, this discrepancy alone is quite sufficient to deem C inelegant, in my opinion.

Well, UNIX is surely responsible for C becoming popular (if not its being a thing in the first place).

I'm not arguing that it is not? It's funny though how many people saw value in C but not in Algol. Maybe C has something going for it?

Free beer alongside a free beer OS, instead of paying thousands of dollars for timesharing OSes like VMS.

I know you keep repeating it. You are conveniently ignoring plenty of other commercial OSs and languages which were successful.

Who, except for people too young to know better, saw value in C but not in Algol? The Bell Labs folks obviously thought enough of Algol such that C is a descendant in the family of Algol-like languages. Algol was widely used in Europe whereas in the U.S. we made do with Fortran, Cobol, and, I think to a lesser extent, PL/I, although the latter had many Algol-like features at the time. (And Fortran evolved to have many of those features; I suppose Cobol also, but I'm not familiar with its post-1981 history.)

Taking a contrarian view to everyone else in this thread, I don't think Unix rocketed C to stardom - Turbo C did. Turbo Pascal was very very popular for PC programming and was eventually supplanted by Turbo C and Turbo C++. Without Turbo C, I think C would have probably become just another niche language used on a niche OS, Unix.

And in line with what you say in another comment, commercial OSes -- including VMS -- were very powerful and much more popular than Unix. In 1982, a single VAX 11/780 running VMS with 4 and 8 MB of RAM could support 10s of programmers editing, compiling, debugging, and testing code. VMS was also a real-time operating system that we used in production to control/monitor/perform-I/O hardware devices handling LANDSAT image data. And Unix is still trying to figure out async I/O ... (Most of my career has been spent on Unix, but I appreciate other operating systems I've worked on as well.)

I have nothing against Algol. Turbo Pascal was my first language (i agree with you about Turbo C). I loved it at the time. But C is different. The same way Lisp is different. It is just one of those languages which have a very simple core idea which is also very powerful at the same time.

Lisp has the code-data duality (everything is a list) going for it and C has everything is pointer to a block of memory and that's it. That block can be a device register, data structure, array of sth. or just about anything you can imagine. This idea enables you some kind of proto-polymorphism without the verbosity and chains of higher level languages (at the cost of safety of course). That is the beauty of C and unlike Lisp it is also lot closer to the metal, which helped a lot with performance.

I think it's normal to be jaded when something objectively superior is being replaced with something simpler. But that doesn't mean the simpler thing is without merit. The world has more dimensions, the technical aspect is just one of it.

No, everything is not a pointer in C; C is based on value types that are passed around by copy (with the exception of arrays and functions). An variable of a given type designates a piece of storage which contains that value, rather than a pointer to it.

C is not significantly different from Algol or Pascal. The difference between C and Algol is a lot smaller than between either of those and Lisp or ML.

What's missing in some Algol-like languages compared to C is the loose pointer arithmetic, and possibly type punning via pointer conversions. Those features allow C programmers to do things like write their own memory allocator, which is incredibly useful in embedded systems. A C project can produce a self-contained image that boots on bare metal, with minimum assembly language. Or on almost bare metal, where there is a boot loader program that provides no services to the C program other than jumping to its entry point and maybe some console printing routines or something.

You have completely misunderstood my comment about why C stands out. I though it was obvious from the example I gave, what I meant, when I said everything is a pointer to something?

As an embedded developer in previous life, I can assure you C is not special because it can run on bare metal. Many other languages can too.

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