[TUHS] History of popularity of C

[Clem Cole]

On Fri, May 22, 2020 at 7:51 PM Greg A. Woods <woods at robohack.ca> wrote:

> I always assumed C became popular because there was a very large cohort
> of programmers who started with it as their first language, usually on
> early Unix, at university, in the late very 1970s and early 1980s.
>
Exactly - my giving away UNIX, it cemented the language and the technology
into a group of young engineers (like me) who then 'spread the gospel' when
we went to real jobs.





> Well, there were a plethora of both full C and "tiny"/"small" C
> compilers widely available in the very early 1980s.
>
Yep -- I listed a little of the pre-history.



>
> Indeed I would say inexpensive C compilers were widely available and
> very popular well before 1985, and a few "toy/tiny" compilers were
> freely available by then too.

Yup, although until the 386 and the DOS extenders, it could be tough to use
with the Gordon's awful 'far pointer' infection.




> Early Atari (6502) computers were partly programmed with a cross-
> compiler, though I've no idea what it was (possibly a re-targeted PCC).
>
Most 6502 shops were assembler, although you are correct cc65 shows up
reasonably early.  It was not PCC based.



> I think VisiCalc had similar origins.
>
Dan Bricklin wrote it assembler.  He had access to the same Harvard PDP-10
that Gates and Allen had used to write MITS Basic a few years earlier.   I
should ask him to be sure, but I was under the impression he used the SAIL
based 6502 assembler I mentioned previously.[1]




>
> The most ground-breaking C compiler might arguably have been
> P.J.Plauger's Whitesmiths C compiler, around about 1978.  I don't think
> it was what you'd call "inexpensive" necessarily, but it was popular.
>
Other than his wretched 'anat' - a natural assembler, which was far from
natural. But you are correct, particularly for non-UNIX boxes, he had the
first 'widely used' compiler.




> In my estimation GCC really only served to cement C's early success and
> popularity.  It gave people certainty that a good C compiler would be
> available for most any platform no matter what happened.
>
I would agree.  C had already been 'winning' by the time of gcc, and
offering a compiler that was so portable and generated 'reasonable' code
(sometimes even better than some of the commercial ones) I think was the
winning score.

>
> I would also argue that non-Unix C compilers actually drove the adoption
> curve of C.
>
I would put a small accent on that.  I think the C compilers that targeted
non-UNIX systems, and in particular the microprocessors were the driver.
The micro's started with assembler in most cases.  Basic shows up and is
small, but it's not good enough for real products like VisiCalc or later
Lotus.   Pascal tries to be the answer, but I think it suffered from the
fact that it makes Pascal a production quality language, you had a extend
it and everybody's extensions were different.

So, C came along and was 'better than assembler' and allowed 'production
quality code' to be written, but with the exception of the far pointer
stuff, pretty much worked as dmr had defined it for the PDP-11.  So code
could be written to work between compilers and systems.   When the 386 DOS
extenders show up, getting rid of far, and making it a 32-bit based
language like the Vax and 68000, C had won.

Clem

1.] FWIW: Bricklin I know socially.  He was one of my brother's quad-mates
at HBS in 1978-79 when he wrote VisiCalc to do his homework [the story is
on the Wikipedia page].   In fact, there is now a plaque in the shared lounge
over the nook where his study carrel was when he wrote it.  The four of
them all did pretty well.  You know Dan's story, his roommate went on to
found Staples, my brother's roommate became the CEO of Pepsi, and my
brother ran Milcron, then founded a materials handling firm that did the
automation for Amazon (and he sold the firm a few years ago to Honeywell).
Also, their section-mate was Clay Christensen of the 'Innovators Dilemma'
fame and of course classmate Meg Whitman would do eBay.   Pretty impressive
class from HBS.
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