| > I think this should not be underestimated. You're right but it's broader than "C folks like terseness." C is famously hard to read. Before Perl we used to joke that C is a write-only language: you can't understand what your own code means just weeks later. Combine this with its lack of bounds checking, pointer arithmetic, and other dangerous features, and the result is a language that's macho for geeks: it's hard, it's dangerous, but it's small and it's fast. It's a motorcycle for nerds. Ada is a tank. Nerds get to establish dominance over lesser nerds by doing hard stuff in hard languages and making it fast. This bestows nerd street cred: geek cred. Ada was used by contractors who needed stuff to work and money was no object. C was used by hackers to do cool hacker stuff that was perceived to be fast and low level. It's not low level: machine architectures haven't resembled the C abstractions since the 1970s. https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479 A modern low-level language would be some brain-bending combination of APL and Lisp with n-dimensional tensor algebra or something. But C looks cool and hard and you will blow both feet off if you don't hold it just right. And there are good free versions. So you can be poor and still demonstrate your machismo. Result, a software industry requiring weekly multi-gigabyte online patches, keeping millions in work. C makes programmers a cheap fungible commodity. https://www.loper-os.org/?p=69 |