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UNIX became popular because it was free beer with source tapes.

Had UNIX been written in PL/I, Mesa or BLISS, those languages would be "C" today.

Oh, how I miss BLISS. It was the first language I learned that got rid of the silly distinction between statements and expressions. What a revelation! Everything was an expression. Everything returned a value. I guess a bit like Ruby, but 40 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLISS

https://www2.cs.arizona.edu/classes/cs520/spring06/bliss.pdf

Elixir possibly has some of this flavour. If and switch are both expressions and return values. I dig it.

I think it is that way in almost every FP language (eg. Scala, Haskell, Kotlin, etc)

> Everything returned a value. I guess a bit like Ruby

Like C, isn't it? Assignments return values! Still feels weird AF to those of us who started on BASIC and Pascal.

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