17 Oct
2011
17 Oct
'11
11:47 a.m.
On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 1:53 PM, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
Would it be a fair statement to say that had it not
been for Unix and
AT&T's (initial) "anyone can get a license as we're not in the
software business" approach that "C" today would largely be a
language relegated to the programming backwater?
I think that's a fair question.
And that "we're not in the software
business" aspect was stipulated
by law. ? So regulation is largely responsible for the popularity of
Unix and C?
Certainly AT&T had that attitude as a direct result of governmental
(juduical) action.
In other words, had Unix been a closed proprietary OS,
would we even
be talking about C? ?Or would it be sort of a vintage curiosity like
BCPL or B?
Entirely possible.
My first exposure to C was in the context of producing computer-based
hands-on museum exhibits in the late 1970s. I was proposing a
Commodore-PET-based solution written in BASIC. The other option was
an S-100 box running a standalone app written in C and run from ROM.
While my proposal didn't win, I did note that the winning proposal
cost several times more, part of which was the royalty to the 8-bit C
compiler vendor for the run-time library. The eventual unbundling of
the cost of hundreds of commonly-used functions was to my observation
*critical* to the commercial adoption of C programs outside of UNIX.
My initial reactions to C were horribly tainted by that experience.
Why would I want to learn a language that obligated me to pay or pass
along the cost of hundreds of dollars per deliverable program when I
could bring the entire project in at a fraction of the cost with
BASIC, assembler, or a combination of the two? I read the articles in
"Byte", c. 1979-1983, about C (something I can recommend to the list -
there really is some good stuff in there), but was unswayed. It
wasn't until the mid-1980s that I experienced C + UNIX, where there
was *always a compiler* and where there was no overhead to write and
distribute code that I really learned C. I've been using it ever
since.
-ethan