[TUHS] C vs the world (was Re: Hypothetical: Could MULTICS have been written in C, if available?)

[G. Branden Robinson via TUHS]

At 2026-05-27T17:07:28-0400, Dan Cross via TUHS wrote:
> The situation is even worse in C, because the language is only
> informally specified, the specification is not tied to the behavior of
> real computers, UB is so non-obvious, and for whatever weird reason,
> the compiler people now have this sadistic hatred of their users and
> will take advantage of any and every instance of UB to make a
> microbenchmark go faster at the expense of real world code.

You ask what the reason for that is.  Why have we seen contretemps like
that over the Dhrystone and Whetstone benchmarks in the 1980s?  Why have
we seen outright scandals like those of Volkswagen and BMW with respect
to diesel engine emissions anti-pollution compliance standards?  At what
level were the decisions to "sex up" the results of these metrics?  What
sort of role makes a mission of proving Goodhart's Law time and again?

Maybe the compiler writers were, more often than not, duty-minded folks
who stopped what they were programming (or thinking), and swept the
floors when you told them to.  Maybe they were affable folks to meet in
the aisle at Safeway, and would reflect your coolness back at you as you
bent their ear.

If you seek the root cause of the sadism, I suggest it's easily found.

> Though in defense of C, people who are fed up with the situation are
> joining the committee and trying to address this.  There's a UB
> working group that's actively trying to reduce it the amount of it in
> the language and the effects it can actually have.

And, we're told, making the language "suck more" with every proposal.

> > If it had found any real bugs, we would have been pleased.  It did
> > not.
> 
> See above. Bluntly, this sounds like hubris.

Yup.

> That said, there is a tendency on this list to comment on the "caliber
> of many programmers today", and not in a good way.  I would invite
> people who do that to perhaps take a moment to consider their
> preconceptions, and to reflect on whether things are really as
> different now as they were back then, and to the extent that they are,
> ask what has actually changed?
> 
> Perhaps it's less that the kids these days are lacking the intrinsic
> motivation, focus, and intestinal fortitude to competently program in
> C, but that they're doing so in an environment that is actively
> hostile to them, and is far, far more complex than it was 30 years
> ago.  The blunt reality is that the C of today is not the C of your
> (or even my: I have no brown left in my hair; this color is silver,
> thank you very much) youth.  Anyway, all I'm really saying is that
> maybe, just maybe, the folks in the trenches have a perspective worth
> more than I often see it given credit for.

One of the slides in Paul Krugman's Nobel Prize lecture said simply
this:

* Listen to the gentiles.

I expect that advice is about as well-received as Krugman himself is, in
certain quarters.

But I like think that this viewpoint was internal, implicit wisdom at
the Bell Labs CSRC.  But possibly I, too, am romanticizing the past...

Regards,
Branden
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