[TUHS] History of popularity of C

[Larry McVoy]

On Fri, May 22, 2020 at 03:01:40PM -0400, Toby Thain wrote:
> On 2020-05-22 2:40 PM, John Gilmore wrote:
> > Tyler Adams <coppero1237 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Doesn't C++ also generate tight code and is fairly close to the metal?
> >> Today C++ is the high performant language for game developers and HFT shops.
> >>
> >> But, I never found it on any of these embedded systems, it was straight C.
> > 
> > My take on this is that programmers who understand the underlying
> > hardware architecture can easily intuit the code that would result from
> > what they write in C.  There are only a few late features (e.g. struct
> 
> A short time playing with Godbolt should challenge that view :)
> 
> https://godbolt.org/
> 
> 
> > parameters, longjmp) that require complex code to be generated, or
> > function calls to occur where no function call was written by the
> > programmer.

What John didn't mention, he just assumes people know and everyone is
the same, is that he is an excellent C programmer, I could fix bugs
in his code.

You can always fine someone who will make a mess of any language.
That's not the point.  

Assume that you have decent programmers, you will be able to understand
and fix their C code.  If you have really good C programmers, like
my company did, you can start to predict what the bottom half of the
function looks like by reading the top half.  We wrote very stylized C,
were not afraid of gotos when used wisely.