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0 pointspjmlp1y ago0 comments

This is kind of what I mean,

"Oh, it was quite a while ago. I kind of stopped when C came out. That was a big blow. We were making so much good progress on optimizations and transformations. We were getting rid of just one nice problem after another. When C came out, at one of the SIGPLAN compiler conferences, there was a debate between Steve Johnson from Bell Labs, who was supporting C, and one of our people, Bill Harrison, who was working on a project that I had at that time supporting automatic optimization...The nubbin of the debate was Steve's defense of not having to build optimizers anymore because the programmer would take care of it. That it was really a programmer's issue.... Seibel: Do you think C is a reasonable language if they had restricted its use to operating-system kernels? Allen: Oh, yeah. That would have been fine. And, in fact, you need to have something like that, something where experts can really fine-tune without big bottlenecks because those are key problems to solve. By 1960, we had a long list of amazing languages: Lisp, APL, Fortran, COBOL, Algol 60. These are higher-level than C. We have seriously regressed, since C developed. C has destroyed our ability to advance the state of the art in automatic optimization, automatic parallelization, automatic mapping of a high-level language to the machine. This is one of the reasons compilers are ... basically not taught much anymore in the colleges and universities."

-- Fran Allen interview, Excerpted from: Peter Seibel. Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming

C's victory is more related to not having anything else as compiled language in the box than anything else regarding its marvelous technical capabilities, so worse is better approach, use C.

Even more so, when Sun started the trend that UNIX development tooling was paid extra, and it only contained C and C++ compilers, for additional compilers like Fortran and Ada, or IDE, it was even a bit more extra on top.

Which other UNIX vendors were quite fast to follow suit.

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AnimalMuppet1y ago

Thanks for the explanation.

But I've seen that quote before (I think from you, even). I didn't believe it then, and I don't believe it now.

There is nothing about the existence of C that prevents people from doing research on the kind of problem that Fran Allen is talking about. Nothing! Those other languages still exist. The ideas still exist. The people who care about that kind of problem still exist. Go do your research; nobody's stopping you.

What actually happened is that the people who wanted to do the research (and/or pay for the research) dried up. C won hearts and minds; Fran Allen (and you) are lamenting that the side you preferred lost.

It's worth asking why, even if Ada or Algol or whatever were extra cost, why weren't they worth the extra cost? Why didn't everybody buy them and use them anyway, if they were that much better?

The fact is that people didn't think they were enough better to be worth it. Why not? People no longer thought that these automatic optimization research avenues were worth pursuing. Why not? Universities were teaching C, and C was free to them. But universities have enough money to pay for the other languages. But they didn't. Why not?

The answer can't be just that C was free and the other stuff cost. C won too thoroughly for that - especially if you claim that the other languages were better.

pjmlpOP1y ago

Worse is better, and most folks are cheapy, if lemons are free and juicy sweet oranges have to be bought, they will drink bitter lemonande no matter what, eventually it will taste great.

Universities are always fighting with budgets, some of them can't even afford to keep the library running with good enough up to date books.

Filligree1y ago

Well, why not? The price tag certainly is what did it for me.

I was twelve. C was free, the alternatives were not. By the time I could have paid for one, I’d been writing C for ten years…

Nowadays I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot stick.

jcranmer1y ago

> What actually happened is that the people who wanted to do the research (and/or pay for the research) dried up. C won hearts and minds; Fran Allen (and you) are lamenting that the side you preferred lost.

Eh, sort of. The rise of C is partially wrapped up in the rise of general-purpose hardware, which eviscerates the demand for optimizers to take advantage of the special capabilities of hardware. An autovectorizer isn't interesting if there's no vector hardware to run it on.

But it's also the case that when Java became an important language, there was a renaissance in many advanced optimization and analysis techniques. For example, alias analysis works out to be trivial in C--either you obviously prove they don't alias based on quite local information, or your alias analysis (no matter how much you try to improve its sensitivity) gives up and conservatively puts it in the everything-must-alias pile; there isn't much a middle ground.

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