“C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success” – Dennis Ritchie

Original title: The Development of the C Language Editorialized title: “C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success” – Dennis Ritchie HN Guideline: > [...] please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

Excerpt: "Thompson was faced with a hardware environment cramped and spartan even for the time: the DEC PDP-7 on which he started in 1968 was a machine with 8K 18-bit words of memory and no software useful to him. While wanting to use a higher-level language, he wrote the original Unix system in PDP-7 assembler. At the start, he did not even program on the PDP-7 itself, but instead used a set of macros for the GEMAP assembler on a…

I think it is worth noting that C is special in the sense that compared to other programming languages it is semantically low-level, pretty much on par with assembly. Which is why it offers less opportunity for automatic optimization than most of other languages do. Therefore, just like with assembly, there is nothing too "unfortunate" about the language's design (including its "treatment of arrays"), and the fact that C has been, and still remains, highly popular is just the result…

I love C. Perhaps this is because it's the first language I was taught. It fascinated me. It was complex, it allowed you to do dangerous things, but once it clicks, its like an epiphany :-) I hardly use it much these days, it's much faster to get things done in python, ruby or perl. Unless you need performance. I guess its like an old song, listening to it brings back memories of what was going on in your life…