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A comment on Chez Scheme is now free. Parent comment

Re:Chez Scheme is now free by TeMPOraL on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @03:20AM (#11578428)
> If by economic you mean "pragmatic" and "engineering considerations", then yes.

C didn't won because of "engineering" or "pragmatic" reasons, it won because it run faster on cheap hardware, which was a big selling point. It wasn't a pragmatic choice, but a stupid and short-sighted one - but those tend to usually win. Computing in the last 30 years was done in spite of, not because of, C.

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Re:Chez Scheme is now free by pjmlp on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @04:21AM (#11578635)
An hardware more powerful than Burroughs machines from 1961, which were happily working with a safe systems programming language based on Algol.

Given that I remember the days junior Assembly developers could easily outperform C code, I don't agree with that point.

I bet if it wasn't for the rise of free UNIX clones, C would already be sharing drinks with Pascal at some retirement home.

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Re:Chez Scheme is now free by nickpsecurity on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @07:10PM (#11585350)
Did I ever tell you about the OS that was written in FORTRAN? Here it is in case I forgot:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRIMOS

That's a CPU and OS for Fortran. I found a web framework for Fortran, too. Today, we could do Hacker News in FORTRAN from the metal up. We'll leave that monstrosity to our imaginations, though. Not even that. ;)

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Re:Chez Scheme is now free by coldtea on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @07:19PM (#11585416)
>C didn't won because of "engineering" or "pragmatic" reasons, it won because it run faster on cheap hardware

Isn't that the very definition of an engineering/pragmatic reason?

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