[johnnyjeans]

Only if you don't understand the history of C. B was a LCD grouping of assembler macros for a typical register machine, C just added a type system and a couple extra bits of syntax. C isn't novel in the slightest, you're structuring and thinking about your code pretty similar to a certain style of assembly programming on a register machine. And yes, that type of register machine is still the most popular way to design an architecture because it has qualities that end up being fertile middle ground between electrical engineers and programmers.

Also there are no languages that reflect what modern CPUs are like, because modern CPUs obfuscate and hide much of how the way they work. Not even assembly is that close to the metal anymore, and it even has undefined behavior these days. There was an attempt to make a more explicit version of the hardware with Itanium, and it was explicitly a failure for much of the same reason than iAPX432 was a failure. So we kept the simpler scalar register machine around, because both compilers and programmers are mostly too stupid to work with that much complexity. C didn't do shit, human mental capacity just failed to evolve fast enough to keep up with our technology. Things like Rust are more the descendant of C than the modern design of a CPU.

[bee_rider]

What do you think a language based on a modern CPU architecture would look like? The big deal is representing the OoO and speculative execution, right?

Text files seem a bit too sequential in structure, maybe we can figure out a way to represent the dependency graphs directly.

[johnnyjeans]

I envision an inflected grammar. That sounds crazy I know, but x64 is an inflected language already. The pointer arithmetic you can attach to a register isn't an expression or a distinct group of words, it's a suffix. Part of the word, indistinguishable from it. Someone once did a great job of explaining to me how that mapped to microcode in a shockingly static way and it blew my mind. I see affixes for controlling the branch predictor. Operations should also be inflected in a contextual way, making their relationship to other operations explicit, giving you control over how things are pipelined. Maybe take some inspiration from afro-asiatic languages, use kind of consonantal root system.

The end result would look nothing like any other programming language and would die in obscurity, to be honest. But holy shit it would be really fucking cool.

[pjmlp]

I certainly understand the design of the language used to expose a PDP-11 in a portable way.

By the way, my introduction to C was via RatC, with the complete listing on A Book on C, from 1988, bought in 1990.

Intel failures tend to be more political than technical, as root cause.

[johnnyjeans]

> I certainly understand the design of the language used to expose a PDP-11 in a portable way.

It depends on what you mean by that. The PDP-11's dialect of B's major changes were more ergonomic handling of strings to no longer required repacking cells, and pointers became byte-aligned rather than word-aligned. C adopted these changes from the PDP-11 dialect of B, but that's the extent of influence the PDP-11 ever had.[1] The compiler size restrictions imposed by the PDP-7 and the GE-635 are far more influential on the semanticalities of the family.

In this rhetoric, what I'll call the "Your computer is not a fast PDP-11" dialogue, I find that people will imply things like pointer arithmetic, granular availability of memory as a flat array, etc. were invented in 1973, as though these are special quirks of the PDP-11 that C thrusted upon the programmer. They're just a normal part of computing, really. All the same criticisms leveraged at C can be leveraged at Forth for example, which isn't even in this class of register machine.

> Intel failures tend to be more political than technical

In the case of Itanium and iAPX432? Absolutely not. Read through the manual of the latter for a lark[2], there was never any chance in hell this thing could have succeeded. You couldn't pay me to maintain code for such a machine, sufficiently smart compiler or not. Itanium was a repeat of the same blunder, only this time Intel didn't even try to base their design on any existing infrastructure.

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20150611114355/https://www.bell-...

[2] - http://www.bitsavers.org/components/intel/iAPX_432/171860-00...