[TUHS] PDP-11 legacy, C, and modern architectures

[Clem Cole]

I need to get a keyboard who keys don't stick.... sigh....  Clem
ᐧ

On Wed, Jun 27, 2018 at 10:33 AM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> I guess my take on it is mixed.   I see some of his points but over all I
> disagree with most of them.  I firmly believe if you look at anything long
> enough you will find flaws.  There is no perfect.   I think Fortran, C,
> even Algol are credits for more what people were able to think about at the
> time and how well they lasted.   As I have said in other places, Fortran is
> not going away. Clem Cole's answer is the Future of Fortran Programming
> Dead
> <https://www.quora.com/Is-the-future-of-Fortran-programming-dead/answer/Clem-Cole> also
> applies to C.   It's just not broken and he's wrong.   Go, Rust *et al*
> is not going to magically overtake C, just as Fortran as not been displaced
> in my lifetime (BTW, I >>like<< both Go and Rust and think they are
> interesting new languages).   He thinks C is not long a low level language
> because when Ken abstracted the PDP-7 into B and then Dennis abstracted the
> PDP-11 into C, the systems were simple.  The HW designers are in a giant
> fake out at this point, so things that used to work like 'register' no
> longer make sense.  Now its the compiler that binds to the primitives
> available to the functions under the covers and there is more to use than
> the PDP-11 and PDP-7 offered.    But wait, that is not always true.   So I
> think he's wrong.   I think you leave the language alone and if the HW
> moves on great.   But if we have a simple system like you have on the Amtel
> chips that most Arduino's and lots of other embedded C programs use, C is
> very low level and most his arguments go away.
>
> Cken
> ᐧ
>
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