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Comment by binary132 | Hacker News Reader

None of these "programming language evolutionary fitness retrospective" discussions ever manage to address the real heart(s) of the question:

- UNIX is C, so C-family languages won.

- The network effect is by far the most dominant force in the matter.

All of us would like to believe that we operate in a world where technical merit determines memetic fitness, because our jobs seem to depend on it: after all, if we build good things, we immediately see the consequences, and others must also see and appreciate these consequences, right? By doing well at that, we succeed, right?

Well, it turns out it's not so much like that actually.

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MacOS, with a slight help from MS, very, very nearly tipped the balance to Pascal in the 80s. I dare say that without C++ hitting mainstream around 1990, C would have languished.

Now you are rewriting history :)

Turbo Pascal was responsible for the Pascal success. And then came delphi along and somehow lost against Visual Basic.

Early Mac Systems were written in pascal, well, Clascal as they called their Object Pascal system in those days, Clascal was developed internally at Apple with Wirth as a consultant. Think Pascal was the primary alternative to MPW until mid System 6 era. MacApp remained Apple's primary API until the mid 90s, and it was 100% written in Object Pascal (formerly Clascal).

Some chunks of Windows were also written in Pascal, using Microsoft Pascal which they'd been using since their CP/M days.

This is very limited to mac, which was really tiny during that period.

The rest of the world looked very differently at that time, and compared to mac had much better development environment.

They were not. The early Mac operating system and Toolbox were written in assembly, with a Pascal API. MacApp was ported to C++ in the late 1980s and went C++ only in the very early 1990s, about 1991-2 with MacApp 3.

MacApp was the framework Apple wrote and promoted, but it wasn’t the primary API; lots of developers wrote directly for the Mac Toolbox or used any of a number of other frameworks like THINK Class Library.

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