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From: "Dan'l Miller" <optikos@verizon.net>
Subject: Re: why the pascal family of languages (Pascal, Ada, Modula-2,2,Oberon, Delphi, Algol,...) failed compared to the C family?
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2014 19:14:08 -0700 (PDT)
Date: 2014-07-16T19:14:08-07:00	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <f9406931-3004-42e2-b205-bcb8f2edfdc4@googlegroups.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <lq6l6n$oh9$1@dont-email.me>

On Wednesday, July 16, 2014 2:52:50 PM UTC-5, Jeffrey Carter wrote:
> AT&T distributed Unix, with a C compiler, free to universities. So a lot of 
> universities used C and a lot of people were exposed to C that way.

This was part of it.  (And Ada was heavily regulated by DoD who held the trademark on Ada (now expired).  The tight grip on Ada gave it an air of expensiveness and lack of freedom to tinker.  C became popular in part due to there being so many nonportable dialects---hence the need for the 1988 ANSI C day of reckoning.

> Pascal was designed as a teaching language and wasn't usable for real-life problems.

Pascal was unpopular due to feeling like a solitary-confinement prison-cell.  By comparison, C felt like being at play in the green fields of the Lord with a Montana-like big blue sky above.  (or in other words Pascal felt like prison and K&R C felt like total freedom, which is why even ANSI C was disdained in its early years, with C programmers preferring K&R C for a few years in the late-1980s through the very 1990 or 1991 or so).

> In the US, at least, "real men" used FORTRAN in the 1960s and 1970s. C is even 
> more "manly".

That is because "real men" don't like checking themselves into Pascal's limited-by-design prison-cell.  Ada gets a bad reputation with some people because they assume that Ada is some sort of Pascal prison-cell due to similarity of syntax.  If Ada had instead taken its base syntax from, say, PL/I (especially the Multics dialect at MIT rather than IBM's) instead, then people might have not brought such negative baggage to Ada.

I am not criticizing Ada.  It is a beautiful engineering achievement.  I am only pointing out the psychology of prejudice & bigotry that goes on in people's minds.

> C was designed by a coder for coding. It's for writing code quickly, without 
> concern for such inessentials as readability, modification, or correctness. Most 
> developers are coders.

Well, sort of.  C was designed in a hurry as a means to an end for Unix.  C needed to rapidly replace PL/I over at Multics's Project MAC when Bell Labs was pulling out of the General-Electric/MIT/Bell-Labs Project MAC, which was dreaming up the 1970 version of what we now call The Cloud.  (Multics was envisioned as a public utility, much like electricity, natural gas, drinking water, and sewer, hence why GE was initially interested.)  Honeywell bought out GE at roughly the same time as Bell Labs hasty exit.  So it is not like C was wisely designed to be the perfect hacker's language or the perfect coder's language.  C was designed to be expedient for some hacker-coder's 1970ish goal of proving to Bell Labs management that Bell Labs did not need to participate in Project MAC/Multics anymore.

  reply	other threads:[~2014-07-17  2:14 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 96+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2014-07-16 12:25 why the pascal family of languages (Pascal, Ada, Modula-2,2,Oberon, Delphi, Algol,...) failed compared to the C family? Nasser M. Abbasi
2014-07-16 16:55 ` Luke A. Guest
2014-07-16 17:40 ` john
2014-07-16 17:47   ` Adam Beneschan
2014-07-16 19:57     ` Jeffrey Carter
2014-07-17 11:53       ` why the pascal family of languages (Pascal, Ada, Modula-2, 2, Oberon, Delphi, Algol, ...) " Luke A. Guest
2014-07-17 17:06         ` why the pascal family of languages (Pascal, Ada, Modula-2,2,Oberon, Delphi, Algol,...) " Jeffrey Carter
2014-07-16 20:52     ` why the pascal family of languages (Pascal, Ada, Modula-2, 2, Oberon, " Georg Bauhaus
2014-07-16 19:22   ` why the pascal family of languages (Pascal, Ada, Modula-2, 2, Oberon, Delphi, Algol, ...) " Simon Wright
2014-07-16 19:52   ` why the pascal family of languages (Pascal, Ada, Modula-2,2,Oberon, Delphi, Algol,...) " Jeffrey Carter
2014-07-17  2:14     ` Dan'l Miller [this message]
2014-07-17  5:29     ` why the pascal family of languages (Pascal, Ada, Modula-2,2,Oberon, anon
2014-07-17 12:24       ` why the pascal family of languages (Pascal, Ada, Modula-2, 2, Oberon, Dan'l Miller
2014-07-22  0:01         ` Randy Brukardt
2014-07-22  0:59           ` pincerfae
2014-07-22 14:41           ` why the pascal family of languages (Pascal, Ada, Modula-2,2,Oberon, Dan'l Miller
2014-07-22 21:46             ` Randy Brukardt
2014-07-16 17:41 ` why the pascal family of languages (Pascal, Ada, Modula-2,2,Oberon, Delphi, Algol,...) failed compared to the C family? Adam Beneschan
2014-07-16 23:06   ` why the pascal family of languages (Pascal, Ada, Modula-2, 2, Oberon, Delphi, Algol, ...) " Simon Clubley
2014-07-16 22:10 ` why the pascal family of languages (Pascal, Ada, Modula-2,2,Oberon, Delphi, Algol,...) " torralbaduran
2014-07-17 11:08 ` Harvey White
2014-07-17 12:04   ` why the pascal family of languages (Pascal, Ada, Modula-2, 2, Oberon, Delphi, Algol, ...) " Simon Clubley
2014-07-17 12:11     ` why the pascal family of languages (Pascal, Ada, Modula-2,2,Oberon, Delphi, Algol,...) " Simon Clubley
2014-07-17 12:20     ` Dmitry A. Kazakov
2014-07-18  2:17       ` Dennis Lee Bieber
2014-07-18  6:53         ` why the pascal family of languages (Pascal, Ada, Modula-2, 2, Oberon, Delphi, Algol, ...) " Simon Wright
2014-07-17 21:37 ` why the pascal family of languages (Pascal, Ada, Modula-2,2,Oberon, Delphi, Algol,...) " leonid.dulman
2014-07-17 22:25   ` Nasser M. Abbasi
2014-07-17 23:50   ` Shark8
2014-07-18  1:00   ` Lucretia
2014-07-18  8:01   ` J-P. Rosen
2014-07-18 15:35   ` Presentation for the Ada-Europe conference (Was: why the pascal family of languages (Pascal, Ada, Modula-2,2,Oberon, Delphi, Algol,...) failed compared to the C family?) Jacob Sparre Andersen
2014-07-19  9:10   ` why the pascal family of languages (Pascal, Ada, Modula-2,2,Oberon, Delphi, Algol,...) failed compared to the C family? Pascal Obry
2014-07-18 11:09 ` leonid.dulman
2014-07-18 18:08 ` isaac1.0
2014-07-18 19:04   ` gautier_niouzes
2014-07-21 23:09     ` isaac1.0
2014-07-19 14:03   ` Dennis Lee Bieber
2014-07-19 12:17 ` jm.tarrasa
2014-07-19 14:12   ` gvdschoot
2014-07-19 14:26     ` why the pascal family of languages (Pascal, Ada, Modula-2, 2, Oberon, Delphi, Algol, ...) " Simon Clubley
2014-07-19 14:35       ` why the pascal family of languages (Pascal, Ada, Modula-2,2,Oberon, Delphi, Algol,...) " gvdschoot
2014-07-19 16:38         ` Simon Clubley
2014-07-19 17:11           ` Georg Bauhaus
2014-07-19 14:56     ` Dan'l Miller
2014-07-19 15:20       ` gvdschoot
2014-07-19 17:56 ` Per Sandberg
2014-07-20 19:40   ` pincerfae
2014-07-20 22:30     ` Shark8
2014-07-20 22:51       ` gautier_niouzes
2014-07-20 23:11         ` why the pascal family of languages (Pascal, Ada, Modula-2, 2, Oberon, " Shark8
2014-07-20 23:21           ` why the pascal family of languages (Pascal, Ada, Modula-2,2,Oberon, " Dan'l Miller
2014-07-21  1:42             ` Shark8
2014-07-21  4:57               ` Nasser M. Abbasi
2014-07-21  6:51                 ` Shark8
2014-07-21 18:01                   ` pincerfae
2014-07-20 23:18         ` Dan'l Miller
2014-07-21  1:16           ` Shark8
2021-05-27  6:53 ` Robin Vowels
2021-05-27  7:55   ` ldries46
2021-05-27 16:45     ` Robin Vowels
2021-05-28  7:22       ` ldries46
2021-05-28 13:59         ` Robin Vowels
2021-05-27 23:47     ` Wilson
2021-05-27 15:46   ` Dennis Lee Bieber
2021-05-27 16:00     ` Paul Rubin
2021-05-27 16:49       ` Robin Vowels
2021-05-27 17:53       ` Dennis Lee Bieber
2021-05-28  0:34       ` John Perry
2021-05-28 12:37         ` Shark8
2021-05-28 13:07           ` John Perry
2021-05-28 13:28             ` Dmitry A. Kazakov
2021-05-30 16:12               ` Luke A. Guest
2021-05-30 19:00                 ` Bill Findlay
2021-05-31 14:26                   ` Paul Rubin
2021-06-01  0:32                     ` Bill Findlay
2021-06-01  3:34                       ` Paul Rubin
2021-06-01 11:23                         ` Bill Findlay
2021-06-01 16:46                           ` Paul Rubin
2021-06-01 23:04                             ` Bill Findlay
2021-06-02 14:04                               ` John Perry
2021-06-02 14:38                                 ` Dmitry A. Kazakov
2021-06-02 17:26                                   ` Simon Wright
2021-06-02 18:13                                 ` Bill Findlay
2021-05-28 15:01           ` Gautier write-only address
2021-05-28 14:49       ` Gautier write-only address
2021-05-28 19:22         ` Paul Rubin
2021-06-01 14:09           ` Shark8
2021-06-02 18:51             ` Gautier write-only address
2021-06-07 17:56               ` Shark8
2021-06-02 19:17 ` Gabriele Galeotti
2021-06-02 23:11   ` Randy Brukardt
2021-06-03  1:29     ` Gabriele Galeotti
2021-06-03 16:51       ` Dennis Lee Bieber
2021-06-02 23:40   ` Paul Rubin
2021-06-03  1:04     ` Gabriele Galeotti
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