Re: why the pascal family of languages (Pascal, Ada, Modula-2,2,Oberon, Delphi, Algol,...) failed compared to the C family?

[Adam Beneschan <adambeneschan@gmail.com>]

On Wednesday, July 16, 2014 5:25:17 AM UTC-7, Nasser M. Abbasi wrote:
> The first language I really liked was Pascal.
> 
> But the Pascal family of languages (including Ada) have
> clearly failed to become popular, at least compared
> to the C-family (C, C++, C#, ....)

I haven't researched this much, so this response is just my take based on my impressions of what has gone on.

Algol, Pascal's predecessor (at least when it comes to language syntax), was never really popular in the U.S., although I don't know why.

Pascal was designed as a teaching language.  And it does seem that it was used a lot in introductory computer science courses after it was created.  Unfortunately, Pascal wasn't general-purpose enough to be used for everything in the real world, and I suspect that that's why the C family took over: students who learned Pascal in college found that it couldn't be used in a production environment without extensions, and C was the best and most viable alternative (compared to COBOL, FORTRAN, BASIC, and maybe PL/I although that language never took off either).  Having a set of library routines helped (the original Pascal didn't even have a concept of using an external library).  So I think there's some truth in your idea of Unix being built on C, which made it easier to define C-based libraries to interface with the OS.  Nevertheless, Pascal could have included a way to interface to an OS (even an OS written in C).  If this had been added to the language early enough, along with some other changes to make Pascal suitable for production use (the requirement for array types to have fixed bounds was a definite hindrance, IMHO), I think it might have won out.

By the time Ada and Modula came along, it was too late, I suspect.  It didn't help that many university faculty didn't want to be associated with a language whose design was spearheaded by the U.S. military.

> My theory: C was used to develop Unix/Linux and
> Windows, and this made it easier for applications
> to be written in C/C++ since the interface to the OS
> was easier. 

As I mentioned, you may be correct with respect to Unix/Linux.  As for Windows, I'd guess that C has already "won" by the time Windows development was started, so Windows being written in C/C++ wouldn't have been really a cause.  But it could have reinforced C's dominance.

                               -- Adam