Re: One other possible reason for the C predominance

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

Yannick Duchêne wrote on comp.lang.ada:
> Read this :http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch04s03.html
> The last part titled “Case Study: C Considered as Thin Glue”

So in essence, C survived and thrived because it provided a layer of
abstraction that was not locked to contemporary hardware.  Big deal.
Lisp, Pascal and Ada did and still do the same (better, actually).

I don't think that was the driving factor for the dominance of C.  The
driving factors were: (1) ease of implementation; (2) availability of
no-cost, open source compilers that came with UNIX; and (3) bad
judgment by programmers who used C outside its intended application
domain (i.e. programmed entire applications instead of low-level OS
kernels and utilities).

Lisp failed to thrive because it is not easy to implement well (it
needs garbage collection, generics, tail call optimization, a large
library, an efficient virtual machine, etc.) and Ada because it lacked
both ease of implementation and no-cost compilers.

Pascal had both ingredients but still lost to C because its standard
library was less versatile.  And because of its use of bounded-length
strings, perhaps.

--
Ludovic Brenta.