Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pjmlp 140 days ago
It is, because C is nothing special, those features are available in other languages.

Proven before C was even a dream at AT&T, and by all other OS vendors outside Bell Labs using other systems languages.

Then people get to argue C can X, yeah provided it is the Compiler XYZ C dialect.
1 comments
rramadass 140 days ago
Not quite.

C took off because system programmers could not do with other languages what they wanted, with the ease and flexibility that C offered.

Having a feature in a language is not the same as how easy it is to span hardware, OS and application in the same language and runtime.

link
pjmlp 140 days ago
Not really.

C took off because it was free, shipped alongside with an operating system that initially was available for a symbolic price, as AT&T was forbidden to take advantage of UNIX.

Had UNIX been a commercial operating system, with additional licenses for the C compiler, like every other operating systems outside Bell Labs, we would not be even talking about C in 2026.

link
rramadass 140 days ago
Being easily affordable/available in those times was the initial "hook" but C's subsequent and sustained success was due to a happy confluence of various design decisions.

Not too high-level, Not too low-level, easy access to memory/ISA, simple abstract machine, being imperative procedural, spanning bare-metal/OS/app, adopted by free software movement producing free compilers/tools, becoming de-facto industry standard ABI etc. all were crucial in its rise to power.

Note that its main competitor at that time, Pascal; lost out in spite of being simpler, having clean high-level features, promoted by academia, safety focused etc.

As Dennis Ritchie himself said in "The Development of the C Language" (https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/chist...);

C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success. While accidents of history surely helped, it evidently satisfied a need for a system implementation language efficient enough to displace assembly language, yet sufficiently abstract and fluent to describe algorithms and interactions in a wide variety of environments.

link