My understanding of computing history is that C was basically
1. A version of PL/I that doesn’t suck. From what I can tell it was way too broad and the implementations weren’t great.
2. An Algol that is designed in the context of “represents concepts that map cleanly to lower level semantics”. Which was basically just coming full circle from Algol being a way for computer scientists to have something more expressive than Fortran and COBOL, because people kept implementing Algol and realizing that it was missing things. In my own uneducated view, Algol (and many LISPs) are too structured around the concept of completing an evaluation of a program, which made sense in the computing world when they originated, but became out of date as computers started being used for more than just directly computing things.
3. Had good implementations of several “trendy” or cutting edge concepts of the time like preprocessing, recursion, and most importantly structs. Yeah most of this wasn’t technically new. But the prior art like Algol68 was horribly flawed for other reasons.
Because the underlying system allowed concepts like null-terminated strings and unchecked pointer arithmetic, it was fair game for C. I don’t see C as a “better or worse” thing compared to other languages but something that had/has to exist as a bridge between intriguing-but-flawed/limited high level languages and the more functional but unexpressive early languages that saw adoption outside of computer science.
Of course it didn’t need to be the case that the Unix ecosystem’s userspace was mostly C, but C was a huge step up for its time. Like try reading Fortran, COBOL, Basic, and Algol and tell me you’d rather work with that than C. Pascal was later and not that much better, plus computing was a lot more fractured/expensive and the internet was basically not a thing, so it’s not like one could always just start writing pascal on their Nix or vice versa. Even today Rust and C++ are basically the only things that can replace C in many contexts, and Rust is pretty new.
1. A version of PL/I that doesn’t suck. From what I can tell it was way too broad and the implementations weren’t great.
2. An Algol that is designed in the context of “represents concepts that map cleanly to lower level semantics”. Which was basically just coming full circle from Algol being a way for computer scientists to have something more expressive than Fortran and COBOL, because people kept implementing Algol and realizing that it was missing things. In my own uneducated view, Algol (and many LISPs) are too structured around the concept of completing an evaluation of a program, which made sense in the computing world when they originated, but became out of date as computers started being used for more than just directly computing things.
3. Had good implementations of several “trendy” or cutting edge concepts of the time like preprocessing, recursion, and most importantly structs. Yeah most of this wasn’t technically new. But the prior art like Algol68 was horribly flawed for other reasons.
Because the underlying system allowed concepts like null-terminated strings and unchecked pointer arithmetic, it was fair game for C. I don’t see C as a “better or worse” thing compared to other languages but something that had/has to exist as a bridge between intriguing-but-flawed/limited high level languages and the more functional but unexpressive early languages that saw adoption outside of computer science.
Of course it didn’t need to be the case that the Unix ecosystem’s userspace was mostly C, but C was a huge step up for its time. Like try reading Fortran, COBOL, Basic, and Algol and tell me you’d rather work with that than C. Pascal was later and not that much better, plus computing was a lot more fractured/expensive and the internet was basically not a thing, so it’s not like one could always just start writing pascal on their Nix or vice versa. Even today Rust and C++ are basically the only things that can replace C in many contexts, and Rust is pretty new.