In <E9734v.BFF@research.att.com>, ark@research.att.com (Andrew Koenig) writes:
> ...
>Now, English is a mess of a language. Its spelling rules are atrocious,
>its grammar is unruly, it has far too many ways to say the same thing,
>and even so, it is hard to talk about people without revealing information
>about them, such as their gender, that may be irrelevant.
>
>I have no doubt that speakers of many languages consider their languages
>to be superior to English. They may even be right. But for many people,
>especially those who live in or near English-speaking communities,
>English is more useful.
>
>So it is also with programming languages. If C++ had not built on C, it
>would never have gotten out of the starting gate. So it had no choice
>but to inherit its computational model from C. Many people consider other
>computational models better, but there is far from a consensus as to
>which one to use. So the C model, which C++ uses, remains the common tongue.
>
>This is a behaviorial observation, not a value judgement.
>--
> --Andrew Koenig
> ark@research.att.com
> http://www.research.att.com/info/ark
Also, C++ came out before the ANSI C standard, and the non OO part of C++
was such an improvement over C that it heavily influenced the standard.
Another thing about language popularity: it must be available at a time
where suitable hardware is available. For all practical purposes, C was a
big improvement over Basic and Pascal, and I languages like Lisp were
always too resource hungry to run on PDP 11s. Once thr hardware became
suitable for Lisp systems, C/C++ had a big advantage in popularity.
Hartmann Schaffer
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