C succeeded by balancing efficiency and expressiveness

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 39:43

   The gentleman with the briefcase was not identified. One of the most famous books that you co-authored was the one on the C programming language. And since C kind of came from Bell Labs and you were so close to it, why was C so... So influential, in your opinion, like now looking back. I think it hit a sweet spot in some sense of efficiency and expressiveness. If you go back to when C was first created, let's just call it 1972-ish or something like that.

2. 40:18

   Machines were pretty wimpy. They didn't have much memory. The first machine that C ran on had, I think, 24K bytes. And that was the whole thing. So you had to write a compiler. Oh, you had an operating system. you needed a bit space for files, what do you do? The disk, I think, was half a megabyte. So it's a little tricky. So C was simple enough that you could see the translation into the underlying actual instructions of the particular machine, the PDP-11 at that point. Language is simple. You could see the compilation. You could imagine building a compiler for it forwardly enough. It wasn't a big language. At the same time, it really was expressive. I mean, you could say what you needed to say very, very effectively in the language. And I think it's hard to find a spot like that. And so one of the reasons I think C has succeeded as long as it

3. 41:17

   has is that it still has that efficiency and expressiveness is, I think, the right word. Certainly, there are lots of other languages which, for various purposes, are better choice at this point. Well, because there are plenty of things that C doesn't do, couldn't do at the time because you didn't have enough resources, right? You couldn't do a lot with, you know, fancy runtime stuff you didn't want to do checking because checking would take code and you come on you've only got suddenly 4k bytes for your program now what so an awful lot of things were cut that way the other thing is the original target for C was to build the operating system and so there's a class set of things that you just don't need if you're building an operating system so I think it was for its time really really really good match and then of course Unix and

4. 42:14

   And C was this sort of symbiosis thing went together. And so Unix was just so much better than any of the commercial operating systems at the time. Just so much easier to use, so much more productive and so much more fun that people used it in preference. And then they would write programs in C and they would result in interesting tools.