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Comment by nec4b | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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