> However, it feels a kin to rewriting history to depict C as a subpar language that was poorly designed and had little to no redeeming qualities, when facts speak for themselves.
It was subpar compared to the state of the art then. It's redeeming quality was that it worked on the PDP-11, whereas the better languages required mainframe level resources. The tragedy isn't that C was invented, it fitted it's niche back then. The tragedy is that as HW evolved the world remained stuck with C rather than switching to better languages.
Re:A Universal I/O Abstraction for C++ (2020)
by titzer on Sunday April 18, 2021 @07:02PM
(#26857363)
C was not extremely simple. Lisp was extremely simple.
Re:A Universal I/O Abstraction for C++ (2020)
by Koshkin on Sunday April 18, 2021 @07:53PM
(#26857759)
Problem was, real world programming in Lisp was not simple.
The pastebin also left out that Bjarne Stroustrup developed C with classes, and the C, as a backward compatible superset of C to take advantage of C's unrivaled popularity.
We all can agree that the science and art behind programming language design progressed a lot in the four decades where we enjoyed C. However, it feels a kin to rewriting history to depict C as a subpar language that was poorly designed and had little to no redeeming qualities, when facts speak for themselves.