[davexunit]

>there is a reason that C is the foundation of computing rather than Lisp. I don't think anybody really thinks otherwise anymore.

C is not the foundation of computing. Why would you say this?

>Likewise, Scheme implementations have mutable hash tables, but they're written in C and not Scheme.

A native code compiler written in Scheme would have its hash table implementation also written in Scheme.

>I don't know how you even write a hash table based on cons cells rather than O(1) indexing.

You wouldn't do that! Cons cells are not the only primitive data type! Another primitive type in Scheme is the vector, which is a mutable array.

I'm sorry, but you greatly misunderstand Lisp and how compilers work.

[coldtea]

>C is not the foundation of computing. Why would you say this?

Because all the popular OSes, drivers, userlands, servers, GUI libraries, and compilers/languages are 99% written in C (or C++ which is close enough).

[nickpsecurity]

That's different. It means C is the most popular language in system programming. Makes so much sense when I explain above that C's prevalence is due to social and economic reasons given you argued it won a popularity contest. Hillary and Trump are also winning those right now if you want to argue how logical correctness and utility are connected to popularity. ;)

[coldtea]

>That's different. It means C is the most popular language in system programming.

And the basis upon which computing sits upon.

Take away all C/C++ code and we have nothing or almost nothing.

Take away all Lisp/Scheme code and people will barely notice.

>Makes so much sense when I explain above that C's prevalence is due to social and economic reasons given you argued it won a popularity contest.

If by economic you mean "pragmatic" and "engineering considerations", then yes.

[nickpsecurity]

"Take away all C/C++ code and we have nothing or almost nothing."

In that meaning, it's true but only as an accident of history that has little to nothing to do with C's design itself.

"If by economic you mean "pragmatic" and "engineering considerations", then yes."

BCPL was whatever compiled on a machine from the 1960's. C was what compiled on a machine from the 1970's. ALGOL was engineered. C was what compiled and ran fast on old hardware. That's it.

http://pastebin.com/UAQaWuWG

The rest was social factors. Even when alternative languages did better, most people didn't adopt them. Most buyers also paid for performance per dollar totally ignoring reliability, security, maintenance, and so on. Unless you argue these don't matter, then the dominance of C and UNIX is once again due to something other than their technical merits. Plus, the fact that their problems stayed in... intentionally... once better hardware came online while other players fixed them in various ways.

[coldtea]

>In that meaning, it's true but only as an accident of history that has little to nothing to do with C's design itself.

I don't believe that for a second. C had very specific performance and memory characteristics that alternatives didn't have.

>C was what compiled and ran fast on old hardware. That's it.

That's a HUGE pragmatic benefit, not a "historical accident".

[nickpsecurity]

If C was made a decade later, we'd have been using Pascal or BCPL or something. Other stuff could do the job. Example: Hansen later put a Pascal variant, Edison, on the same machine thst was simpler, safer, and faster to compile. Pascal itself was ported to 70+ architectures from mainframes to 8-bitters.

Nah, we didn't need C. Thompson just really liked BCPL. It was crap. So they tweaked it into C. It still couldn't write UNIX. Ritchie added structs and that version finally did the job. All in the papers I cited. It's facts in their own writings and predecessor papers (eg BCPL) why each decision was made.

[PeCaN]

> And the basis upon which computing sits upon.

How does being the basis follow from being popular

> Take away all C/C++ code and we have nothing or almost nothing.

We had Lisp machines in the 70s, Oberon system in the 90s, Forth systems basically throughout history... take away C and C++ and something else would've become popular. Probably Pascal, some random low-level Lisp dialect, or Forth, given that those were all reasonably popular in a similar timeframe as C. For something that is a ‘basis’, C had an awful lot of competition.

> Take away all Lisp/Scheme code and people will barely notice.

Well, aside from every Emacs and AutoCAD user in the world.

Also HN wouldn't exist, so there's that.

[coldtea]

>How does being the basis follow from being popular

The basis is by definition popular.

If it's not popular (at least where it matters) it's not the basis. Basis is the fundamental thing on top of which something (the IT world as we know it) stands.

One could argue that algorithms are more basic, but we're talking about programming languages here, and at that level, C/C++ has been, and remains king for anything crucial. Even Java, the CLR and V8 are written in C/C++ (to name but a few environments standing on this "base").

>We had Lisp machines in the 70s, Oberon system in the 90s, Forth systems basically throughout history... take away C and C++ and something else would've become popular. Probably Pascal, some random low-level Lisp dialect, or Forth, given that those were all reasonably popular in a similar timeframe as C. For something that is a ‘basis’, C had an awful lot of competition.

Not sure how this argument is supposed to work.

To be the basis of something doesn't mean you don't have competition. Just that you prevailed over it.

>Well, aside from every Emacs and AutoCAD user in the world. Also HN wouldn't exist, so there's that.

Still people would barely notice. If you think Emacs and AutoCAD would make a huge difference to the world if they disappeared (compared to say, Windows, Linux, Android, or, if we're to talk about sites and apps, Google, Facebook, Photoshop, Word, etc) then you've been on an echo chamber for too long.

(Not to mention that most Emacs users use it for if not C/C++ then for languages whose compilers are written with C/C++, on OSes written in C/C++, and that Emacs itself is written in C -- the base were elisp stands on is C).

[TeMPOraL]

> If by economic you mean "pragmatic" and "engineering considerations", then yes.

C didn't won because of "engineering" or "pragmatic" reasons, it won because it run faster on cheap hardware, which was a big selling point. It wasn't a pragmatic choice, but a stupid and short-sighted one - but those tend to usually win. Computing in the last 30 years was done in spite of, not because of, C.

[pjmlp]

An hardware more powerful than Burroughs machines from 1961, which were happily working with a safe systems programming language based on Algol.

Given that I remember the days junior Assembly developers could easily outperform C code, I don't agree with that point.

I bet if it wasn't for the rise of free UNIX clones, C would already be sharing drinks with Pascal at some retirement home.

[nickpsecurity]

Did I ever tell you about the OS that was written in FORTRAN? Here it is in case I forgot:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRIMOS

That's a CPU and OS for Fortran. I found a web framework for Fortran, too. Today, we could do Hacker News in FORTRAN from the metal up. We'll leave that monstrosity to our imaginations, though. Not even that. ;)

[coldtea]

>C didn't won because of "engineering" or "pragmatic" reasons, it won because it run faster on cheap hardware

Isn't that the very definition of an engineering/pragmatic reason?

[wtbob]

> And the basis upon which computing sits upon.

No, C is the basis of a lot of programs. It is not, nor could it be, the basis of a sane system of computation.

[coldtea]

That's an "moral" style judgement.

From a pragmatic perspective computing is just "a lot of programs".

It's not what "should be" -- it's what it is.

[wtbob]

No, computation is a mathematical discipline; the lambda calculus is one way of thinking about computation (I won't say it's the best, but it's a way) which is part of that discipline; C simply … isn't.

Common Lisp, of course, is a hell of a lot more than just the lambda calculus, but it's also a hell of a lot better a language than is C.

[pjmlp]

An historical accident driven by the facts that AT&T initially gave UNIX code for free to universities and some of those students went out to win the workstation market based on that free code, e.g. Sun.

If UNIX had been commercially licensed, like every other OS back then, the C foundation would never had happened.

[TeMPOraL]

That's ignoring all the computing work done before C. C and UNIX were huge steps back in computing, that we're only slowly beginning to recover from.

[pjmlp]

There a sentence from a famous women in the history of computing, I don't recall which one, about C setting the progress of compiler optimizations back to the dawn of computing.

[groovy2shoes]

Perhaps it was Fran Allen. In Coders at Work, she has quite a few things to say on the topic:

--- Begin Quote ---

-Seibel-: When do you think was the last time that you programmed?

-Allen-: Oh, it was quite a while ago. I kind of stopped when C came out. That was a big blow. We were making so much good progress on optimizations and transformations. We were getting rid of just one nice problem after another. When C came out, at one of the SIGPLAN compiler conferences, there was a debate between Steve Johnson from Bell Labs, who was supporting C, and one of our people, Bill Harrison, who was working on a project that I had at that time supporting automatic optimization.

The nubbin of the debate was Steve's defense of not having to build optimizers anymore because the programmer would take care of it. That it was really a programmer's issue. The motivation for the design of C was three problems they couldn't solve in the high-level languages: One of them was interrupt handling. Another was scheduling resources, taking over the machine and scheduling a process that was in the queue. And a third one was allocating memory. And you couldn't do that from a high-level language. So that was the excuse for C.

-Seibel-: Do you think C is a reasonable language if they had restricted its use to operating-system kernels?

-Allen-: Oh, yeah. That would have been fine. And, in fact, you need to have something like that, something where experts can really fine-tune without big bottlenecks because those are key problems to solve.

By 1960, we had a long list of amazing languages: Lisp, APL, Fortran, COBOL, Algol 60. These are higher-level than C. We have seriously regressed, since C developed. C has destroyed our ability to advance the state of the art in automatic optimization, automatic parallelization, automatic mapping of a high-level language to the machine. This is one of the reasons compilers are... basically not taught much anymore in colleges and universities.

--- End Quote ---

(taken from pp. 501-502)

[pjmlp]

Yep that one.

[eggy]

Great quote. I had never read that one. The irony of language wars about the monolith that is C vs. the many higher-level languages that allow a human to code according to his mental abstractions and cognitive ability, rather than memorizing machine-specific, or os-specific facts that don't translate over to newer machine architectures. All this on HN, running on a Lisp, Arc, that once sat upon an academic scheme now called Racket.

I agree C is necessary for low-level programming, but for the meat of all the other applications and usages, higher-level languages are needed. I don't mind programming certain things in C, but I thoroughly enjoy the mental exercise when programming in the J programming language, Lisp, or Forth. Yes, Forth. C programmers can have the Earth; I would like to be coding with the fellas who design mission-critical software for satellites like Rosetta, and groups like NASA and the ESA, using Forth in Rosetta's case [1].

Slim Whitman sold more records than the Beatles, or so I think I heard that on a late-night TV commercial back in the 80s, but I never owned a record from him ;)

  [1]  http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/2003ESASP.532E..72B

[coldtea]

>That's ignoring all the computing work done before C.

And we can really ignore it software wise. We only use its theoritical heritage now.

[chubot]

C is the foundation of computing in the sense that essentially every programming language and operating system is written in C or C++, and those are the tools that enable every other piece of software. More precisely, I would say that C is the foundation of software; it's how we stopped throwing out our programs when we changed computers. The first portable operating system kernels were written in C.

I guess I could have been more precise and said that the lambda calculus (rather than Scheme/Lisp) is not the foundation of computing. It seems like there are people who still think this; see my recent response here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11412392

You could say Lisp and Scheme are proof of that. To actually be bootstrapped, they had to add all this other stuff like vectors and hash tables. I don't know the details of how well those are axiomatized. Paul Graham's Arc tried to a little further down, i.e. unifying functions and macros, defining numbers in terms of lists a la Peano arithmetic, etc., but I'm not sure how far that effort went.

I mentioned all my experience with Lisp... doing SICP 19 years ago, and then coming back to it. As I said, I think it's outstanding research, but if you are trying to build an entire computing universe out of it, that's folly. Good luck. It's just not powerful enough -- once you add all the stuff you actually need, you're not far from the complexity of C.

[brlewis]

In the 1980s Scheme was not performant enough. C was how you got tolerably fast programs. A lot of research, notably in garbage collection, has made Scheme much more performant since then. Additionally, computer hardware has improved to the point where people write useful programs in languages that are dramatically slower than Scheme, e.g. PHP, Python, Ruby.

You are conflating minimalism with the Scheme language because Scheme is often used to illustrate minimalism. Vectors and hash tables are not "all this other stuff", they're part of the language spec[1]. You're also throwing Lisp in there even though minimalism is not a central theme of Lisp.

[1] When you did SICP hash tables were not part of the language spec although implementations generally had them; they got standardized in 2007 with R6RS. But vectors were in the language spec since at least 1985.

[clacke2]

> To actually be bootstrapped, they had to add all this other stuff like vectors and hash tables.

Just like C had to add things like arrays to the Turing machine? C doesn't even have hash tables in the spec! According to your definitions, C is a toy language.

[chubot]

No, because it's possible to implement efficient hash tables with C's primitives -- in fact that's how hash tables in essentially ALL languages ARE implemented.

cons cells are not sufficient to implement hash tables. Scheme needs arrays for that. cons cells can be implemented efficiently using arrays, but the converse isn't true, so arrays are more fundamental in some sense.

If you don't care about algorithmic efficiency, then you could choose either cons cells or arrays as your primitive. But obviously we do care, so arrays were the right choice. IOW, C was the right choice, not Scheme.

[nickpsecurity]

"No, because it's possible to implement efficient hash tables with C's primitives -- in fact that's how hash tables in essentially ALL languages ARE implemented."

Because each architecture has a C compiler that's been highly optimized. Popularity plus money invested. That's it. If you were right, we'd see optimizations coded in C even when alternative, optimizing compilers were available. I got a one-word counter to that interestingly enough from "high-performance computing" field: FORTRAN. Free Pascal people are doing fine in performance and low-level code as well despite little to no investment in them.

Seems throwing money at a turd (eg FORTRAN, C) can get a lot of people's hands on it despite some of us shuddering and saying "Get that pile of crap away from me!"

[pjmlp]

It is a toy language.

One step above a portable macro assembler, developed in a decade where research labs outside AT&T were already using safe systems programming languages for about a decade.

Their big failure was that they were selling their work, instead of doing like AT&T that initially gave UNIX for free, because it was forbidden to sell it.

Unfortunately free always wins, regardless of quality.

[davexunit]

>cons cells are not sufficient to implement hash tables.

Again, cons cells are not the only primitive type for making compound data structures.

[sklogic]

> in fact that's how hash tables in essentially ALL languages ARE implemented

Obviously a false statement.

[fredmorcos]

> Just like C had to add things like arrays to the Turing machine?

Care to elaborate on that?