[steveklabnik]

I am curious, knowing that history, why do you think that it shouldn't have?

I have my own thoughts that I'd be happy to share, but I don't want to spoil your opinion with them.

(This goes for basically anyone who's interested in talking about it, I think it's a fascinating bit of history.)

[tombert]

I just feel like it emphasized safety in a way that C doesn't, while still being fairly high performance. It always seemed like a neat language.

[steveklabnik]

Gotcha, thanks :)

I wouldn't disagree with either of those things at a high level, but I think in practice, the details matter, and it's more of those details that led to the present state than the high level goals, which certainly were laudable.

[fsckboy]

it's not like we didn't know about safety back then, but computers were slow, memory was limited, compilers had to be small, optimization was rare, and C was screamingly fast.

At the same time, when major compiler vendors couldn't even get their Ada compilers out the door in project overruns measured in years, Mitch Kapor's 1-2-3 was written and took over the spreadsheet market (dethroning the incumbent Visicalc) and it was written in assembler, not even C, and barely had memory to spare on user machines (memory? there was barely address space left to spare). The tradeoffs were authentic, and there was zero enthusiasm for Ada among programmers or entrepreneurs looking to get products launched. The mainframe world could have been different but the personal computer software market was exploding in a way larger systems never did.

(oh and let me add, all the undefined behaviors back then were very clearly defined (perhaps over a small field of options) and extremely useful, and should have been left that way; shoot out a compiler warning or error if they get your panties in a bunch)