[TUHS] History of popularity of C

[Dan Cross]

Cc: to COFF, as this isn't so Unix-y anymore.

On Tue, May 26, 2020 at 12:22 PM Christopher Browne <cbbrowne at gmail.com>
wrote:

> [snip]
> The Modula family seemed like the better direction; those were still
> Pascal-ish, but had nice intentional extensions so that they were not
> nearly so "impotent."  I recall it being quite popular, once upon a time,
> to write code in Modula-2, and run it through a translator to mechanically
> transform it into a compatible subset of Ada for those that needed DOD
> compatibility.  The Modula-2 compilers were wildly smaller and faster for
> getting the code working, you'd only run the M2A part once in a while
> (probably overnight!)
>

Wirth's languages (and books!!) are quite nice, and it always surprised and
kind of saddened me that Oberon didn't catch on more.

Of course Pascal was designed specifically for teaching. I learned it in
high school (at the time, it was the language used for the US "AP Computer
Science" course), but I was coming from C (with a little FORTRAN sprinkled
in) and found it generally annoying; I missed Modula-2, but I thought
Oberon was really slick. The default interface (which inspired Plan 9's
'acme') had this neat graphical sorting simulation: one could select
different algorithms and vertical bars of varying height were sorted into
ascending order to form a rough triangle; one could clearly see the
inefficiency of e.g. Bubble sort vs Heapsort. I seem to recall there was a
way to set up the (ordinarily randomized) initial conditions to trigger
worst-case behavior for quick.

I have a vague memory of showing it off in my high school CS class.

        - Dan C.
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