On the history and justification of the C programming language
The author snorts at aspects of C that led to its commonplace usage.<p>&gt; 9. New design goal: trim out anything hard to compile from CPL. Naturally eliminates most features for robust and maintainable programming.<p>Naturally? If those features are hard to compile, then they are hard to reason about; the author begs the question in their statement, but I am not convinced by their conclusion. There&#x27;s a tendency for things which are hard to reason about to be difficult to port to other systems; it is a complexity issue, and the complexity of a behaviour influences how it can be re-implemented easily or swiftly by others.<p>&gt; 11. The result of these was BCPL [5]: a typeless, word-oriented language with few keywords and unrestricted use of memory. Created philosophy of &quot;the programmer is in charge and gets no help.&quot; Compiler was easy to write on Most Godawful Computer on Earth. Ran fast on it, too.<p>Great!<p>Sounds like BCPL was an excellent tool for their use case, and in providing power with a low difficulty for implementation, it would be easy for others to enjoy its benefits.<p>&gt; 14. [...] Stripped out or changed most features benefiting safety&#x2F;security, maintenance, and consistency.<p>Because they were unnecessary. Don&#x27;t over-engineer your products, or you&#x27;ll end up with a product that fails in the market; like MULTICS. It&#x27;s like they learned a thing or two from their past ventures.<p>My Conclusion: C and Unix succeeded because they were simple to re-implement and&#x2F;or port. Other, more complex systems were too hard or near-impossible to re-implement and&#x2F;or port. At a time when good, cheap software was in-demand but scarce the pair were well-positioned to sweep the market, and so they did. Unix may have failed to reach the desktop, but C made it there; because it was easy to implement, had a small foot print, and produced fast code.<p>It&#x27;s not like C and Unix stopped development, either. Let&#x27;s not ignore the last 30 years, now.