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A comment on “Swift will be open source later this year”. Parent comment

Re:“Swift will be open source later this year” by danieldk on Tuesday June 09, 2015 @02:46AM (#9684392)
It feels much too pragmatic for my taste.

C was unprincipled and pragmatic too, it was created with the goal of making UNIX portable. Still, C became one of the most popular and influential languages.

While I prefer ADTs/generics too, let's not forget that many people are less principled and pragmatic factors influence language choice as much (toolchain, ecosystem, popularity, familiarity).

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Re:“Swift will be open source later this year” by pjmlp on Tuesday June 09, 2015 @03:44AM (#9684522)
> Still, C became one of the most popular and influential languages.

That was a side effect of successful startups (Sun, SGI...) adopting UNIX as their OS.

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Re:“Swift will be open source later this year” by danieldk on Tuesday June 09, 2015 @04:21AM (#9684608)
The success of UNIX is inseparable from C and vice versa. C made UNIX one of the first portable operating systems and, by virtue of being low-level, provided performance.
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Re:“Swift will be open source later this year” by pjmlp on Tuesday June 09, 2015 @04:26AM (#9684621)
The same could be said of OSes using Algol and Mesa. They just hadn't successful startups using them.
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Re:“Swift will be open source later this year” by danieldk on Tuesday June 09, 2015 @06:51AM (#9685055)
There are good reasons that these startups weren't using OSes using Algol and Mesa. You seem to imply that the success of C and Unix is some historical accident as a result of two startups picking Unix randomly, and their choice was bit a function of the technical properties of UNIX and C. Which, is of course, nonsense.

Sun used Unix because Sun was co-founded by Bill Joy. By that time, Joy was already deeply involved in Unix (per BSD). If he didn't find Unix and C likeable and up to the task, they would have made different choices.

SGI and Sun were just one of many catalyzers, like a lot of programming languages have catalyzers.

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Re:“Swift will be open source later this year” by pjmlp on Tuesday June 09, 2015 @07:09AM (#9685117)
You just confirmed what I said.

The startups that have chosen UNIX, did so because the owners were part of the American UNIX university culture.

A different background would have mean a very different history in mainstream OSes and their respective system programming languages.

In Europe C had very little meaning until most enterprises started to replace their mainframes by UNIX servers from those companies.

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Re:“Swift will be open source later this year” by kayamon on Wednesday June 10, 2015 @10:22AM (#9692392)
Having had exposure to both C and Pascal at around the sane time, I vastly preferred working in C.

I do think there's something intrinsically good about it compared to other contemporary systems languages - I don't think it's just that it tagged along with Unix.

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