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

[Bakul Shah via TUHS]

On May 26, 2026, at 7:01 AM, Larry McVoy via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
> 
> Languages like Rust are all the rage, but they take away a lot of the joy
> of making stuff work well in C.  I get it, there are far more programmers
> that want to look at their phone than there are programmers who are good
> enough to program in C.

That really depends on what is joy to a programmer! At
different times in my life I have enjoyed using high level
to low level languages. Some just to play with, some for
real (or paying) work. They all have their strengths and
weaknesses. Writing assembly language code for a regular
instruction set machine like Motorola 68K or AMD 29K was an
absolute joy, but I wouldn't want to write or maintain large
programs in them. I really like Scheme as well as array
languages for exploring ideas or algorithms but I wouldn't
want to write kernel code in them (though I do think that a
researchy OS in Scheme would be a fun exercise, to explore
or teach OS concepts).