[TUHS] Hypothetical: Could MULTICS have been written in C, if available?

[Larry McVoy via TUHS]

On Mon, May 25, 2026 at 05:55:51PM -0700, Bakul Shah via TUHS wrote:
> On May 25, 2026, at 5:24???PM, Clem Cole via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
> > 
> > Coming back to the question of PL/1 *vs. *C, I have a longer responce on
> > quora:  https://www.quora.com/What-makes-the-C-language-powerful that I
> > will crib here.   When PL/1 and Algol68 were being created, and frankly,
> > later with Ada and others, there was always a tendency to go overboard.
> > But to me, the less-is-more rule applies: C is powerful not only because of
> > what is in the language but also because of what Dennis (and Ken) left out.
> 
> IMHO it is less less-is-more and more the *low-level* nature of C.

I have a son who is more about theory, he's a math guy.  I nudged him 
towards programming, he of course went to python.  I nudged him towards
C and he came back with the best statement ever that I have gotten from
him: In C, you can feel the machine.  Yes, Travis, yes you can.  That's
part of what makes C great.

I'm an old dude, I really love C, I get that it is hard to do things right
in C, I get what all all the haters say about it.  But I had a team that 
used C in the right way, it really, really worked well for us.  There is
stuff you can do in C that is really hard to do in the "better" languages
and we took full advantage of that.

It seems like people want to move away from C to stuff like Go and Rust
and whatever.  They are probably right.  C is not for the casual people,
if you aren't paying attention C is not for you.  We paid attention and
it worked for us.  

--lm