The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C
Oh for heavens' sakes. Yet more ignorance.<p>A more realistic view of C:<p>- C is straightforward to compile into fast machine code...on a PDP-11. Its virtual machine does not match modern architectures very well, and its explicitness about details of its machine mean FORTRAN compilers typically produce faster code. The C virtual machine does not provide an accurate model of why your code is fast on a modern machine. The social necessity of implementing a decent C compiler may have stifled our architecture development (go look at the Burroughs systems, or the Connection Machine, and tell me how well C's virtual machine maps to them).<p>- C's standard library is a joke. Its shortcomings, particularly around string handling, have been responsible for an appalling fraction of the security holes of the past forty years.<p>- C's tooling is hardly something to brag about, especially compared to its contemporaries like Smalltalk and Lisp. Most of the debuggers people use with C are command line monstrosities. Compare them to the standard debuggers of, say, Squeak or Allegro Common Lisp.<p>- Claiming a fast build/debug/run cycle for C is sad. It seems fast because of the failure in this area of C++. Go look at Turbo Pascal if you want to know how to make the build/debug/run cycle fast.<p>- Claiming that C is callable from anywhere via its standard ABI equates all the world with Unix. Sadly, that's almost true today, though, but maybe it's because of the ubiquity of C rather than the other way around.<p>So, before writing about the glories of C, please go familiarize yourself with modern FORTRAN, ALGOL 60 and 68, Turbo Pascal's compiler and environment, a good Smalltalk like Squeak or Pharo, and the state of modern pipelines processor architectures.