17 Apr
2017
17 Apr
'17
4:23 p.m.
I think timing had a lot to do with C's success.
It's a decent language and at the time powerful and flexible compared to
other languages. Universities picked up UNIX and C and taught a lot of
students. The went forth taking their skills with them.
On 16 April 2017 at 01:56, Charles Dickman via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org
wrote:
> There are a lot of smart people here with wide ranging experiences, so
> I like to ask questions from time to time that get more to philosophy.
> So "If C is so evil why is it so successful" was one of those
> questions.
>
> The answer I see is that it is the path of least resistance to the
> most successful outcome in the time horizon of the effort.
>
> Or, it gets the job done.
>
> Personally, I am stuck in the machine control world where things like
> symbolic names and type checking are sometimes non-existant. And I
> wonder why.
>
> SIL-3 and PLe with stone knives and bearskins.
>
> On Wed, Apr 12, 2017 at 1:48 PM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk
> <cctalk at classiccmp.org wrote:
> > On
04/11/2017 07:03 PM, Charles Dickman via cctalk wrote:
> >> The Balkanized nature of programming is interesting.
>
> > You might find more fertile ground plowing the plctalk.net forum when
> > your questions relate to the STL/SCL/FBD/LAD/CSF area.
>
> I am familiar with STL (and some of the others). My question was not
> for help. I was trying to present a contrast between the nit-picking
> the list was doing about C and that fact that a huge amount of mission
> critical programming is done in languages that are essentially machine
> code.
>
> It was a ham fisted attempt. Don't post after too many high ABV IPA's.
>
> > FWIW, "STL" in Siemens-talk is an acronym for "Statement
List". Why it
> > isn't "SL" is anyone's guess.
>
> Probably for the same reason that PZD is process data.
>
> > --Chuck
>
> -chuck
>
--
4.4 > 5.4