Re: Why C for the Open Source Movement?

["Ludovic Brenta" <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>]

Jeffrey Creem writes :
> All of those projects started before there was a freely available Ada
> compiler.
>
> In the case of someting like the GNU project itself, when Stallman
> started the GNU project, Ada 83 was not even really out yet and
> certainly not in a position where it was stable.
[...]

I think C was well suited as a bootstrap language, because C was
designed to make the compiler writer's job easy. When starting the GNU
project, RMS first wrote a C compiler, and then used that to write a
Lisp system, which he used for Emacs. That was the right thing to do,
IMHO.

Early on, Lisp was therefore in a much better position than Ada to
become the language of choice for GNU. Even today, there is still quite
a lot of Lisp in GNU/Linux systems; and not just in Emacs and XEmacs,
as there are several free Common Lisp and Scheme systems available now.
But even then, Lisp is still a minority language.  So the OP's question
remains valid, but in the context of the early days of the GNU project,
I would ask "why C and not Lisp"? I think it may be because Lisp has or
can be perceived to have too much overhead for writing libraries or a
kernel, and so was summarily and incorrectly dismissed by application
programmers. I would think the folks on comp.lang.lisp have already
discussed this question many times.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.