Comment by pcwalton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pcwalton | Hacker News Reader

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> So I think nobody ever rewrites old software. They write new versions of similar things, and then hopefully those new things get adopted. But the old thing will probably be around for a long time too.

That's very true. The most we can hope for is that Rust and other languages, such as Go and Swift, continue to chip away at the market share of C and C++. It'll be a long process.

I'm not a "rewrite everything in Rust" booster; as much as I would like to, that won't realistically happen. Instead, I see Rust as another player in the "programming language Renaissance" that has been going on since the mid-2000s. C and C++ are losing their dominance and instead are becoming part of a broad ecosystem of languages. And that's great: the fact that we have so many choices in languages now has been a very good thing for productivity and security.

> Actually that was thing I was thinking while reading this PDF -- a lot of it can be boiled down to "C and C++ have network effects". Particularly C++.

I agree. That's why I think this paper overanalyzes the success of C and C++. They became dominant because of network effects: simple as that.

I think the article helps to explain why C was able to leverage network effects so well. Neither C nor Unix came out of the gate in a dominating position. Indeed, it's arguably only in the past 20 years that it clearly dominated. Fortran, Pascal, and a bevy of other languages were at times much more widespread and influential. Even today C isn't the most used language. And yet it's influence continues to be outsized.

C isn't just a language, it's an entire ecosystem of toolchains and software that facilitate network effects. "Chance" is far too convenient an explanation. No doubt chance had a significant role, but if C were as useless, unsafe, and devoid of redeeming qualities as many people argue, then I don't see how C could have benefited so strongly from network effects.

C wasn't useless and unsafe at the time it became dominant. It was quite state-of-the-art at the time. We've just learned more about what works well and what doesn't in programming languages since 1978, which is why C is no longer as dominant as it once was.

It was quite state-of-the-art at the time.

Most of the criticisms you hear about C today (type safety, memory safety, no garbage collection) were criticisms that C got when it was first invented.

In fact there are fewer criticisms of C than there used to be: a lot of the early criticism centered around syntax, but the C syntax kind of won, so you don't hear that anymore.

Hoare did not think like that.

"Many years later we asked our customers whether they wished us to provide an option to switch off these checks in the interests of efficiency on production runs. Unanimously, they urged us not to--they already knew how frequently subscript errors occur on production runs where failure to detect them could be disastrous. I note with fear and horror that even in 1980, language designers and users have not learned this lesson. In any respectable branch of engineering, failure to observe such elementary precautions would have long been against the law."

This was in 1981, and "language designers and users have not learned this lesson." was a jab at C.

Also Xerox and ETHZ were busy using safer systems programming languages.

ESPOL and NEWP, already using UNSAFE blocks were the state of the art systems programing in the 60's.

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