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0 pointspjmlp8y ago0 comments

Which means you missed all that BBS and USENET bashing fun.

No, bashing C is a common practice from those of us on the memory safe side of the fence since the early days.

Take the paper "A History of CLU"[0] describing how CLU was designed and implemented in 1975.

"I believe this is a better approach than providing a generally unsafe language like C, or a language with unsafe features, like Mesa [Mitchell, 1978], since it discourages programmers from using the unsafe features casually."

There are tons of other examples, all available in old papers, BBS and USENET archives.

[0] http://publications.csail.mit.edu/lcs/pubs/pdf/MIT-LCS-TR-56...

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simion3148y ago

Thanks, I will read it, so are you of the opinion that there is no job that C is the best tool? Btw I am not a C developer and I would never use C except if I am asked to work on a project that uses C already. I would use C++ with Qt for GUI though.

pjmlpOP8y ago

Exactly, C only became widely adopted by the industry thanks to AT&T only being allowed to charge a symbolic price for UNIX and making the source code available to universities.

Which 80's startups like Sun and SGI used as basis for their workstation OSes.

Bjarne created C++, because after having to use BCPL instead of Simula to finish his PhD, he never wanted to work like that ever again.

So C with Classes started as a tool for Bjarne to target C, while staying productive and able to write safer code.

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