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.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
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.
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.