The Penguin of Evil

@bitofhope and to be clear I just care about the history. I’ve no problem with the idea the software world would have been a better place if Unix had been built on and spread a language that took less of a relaxed attitude to types and pointers.

@bitofhope They never produced a C compiler for the PDP7, only a very primitive threadcode B “compiler” where calling it a compiler was pushing it somewhat.

And yes IBM not only got Fortran into 8kW (6bit words) they did it on a machine in memory with no disk storage.

C is not lighter than Fortran (and I write compilers amongst other things). B was although it’s a stretch to call the PDP7 B a compiler as it really just chains together subroutine calls.

@bitofhope @jackalope There were other languages of the time that also worked well for systems programming. Mac people for example will point at just what was done in (extended) Pascal on the Mac.
And in theory yes you could have written Unix in an extended pascal, and squashed the compiler and the runtime and the rest of it into a PDP-11.

@bitofhope @jackalope That would be to totally misunderstand why C exists and what it exists for. There were people who implemented commercial operating systems in Fortran. It’s grim (eg PR1MOS). BCPL assumes word oriented machines, and things like BLISS were just horrible.
It’s also inaccurate to talk about C being “light”. A well done pascal or fortran compiler is comparable to K&R C with structs.
Where it went wrong is that people started writing million line projects in C, then C++

@corbin Probably still 5 years too soon but I would hope the 2027 CS student will be taught the usual engineering flow of specification, formal verification and safety analysis, design, some coding and what should be tiny bit of debug during validation at the end.

Reproducability is everything. If your binary isn’t an exact match for the previous tested copy you are doing QA not production.