Bill House wrote:
>
> M. Prasad <prasadm@not4u.polaroid.com> wrote in article
> <334CD665.186E@not4u.polaroid.com>...
>
> > So hype or the lack of it doesn't quite do it.
>
> Hype alone won't make an intelligent shopper buy, but without some form of
> hype, the shopper needs to be quite a scrounger to even locate the
> "product". In an ideal world, perhaps all products would be evaluated
> fairly, but this world is no one's ideal.
I am sure there have to be mechanisms to make the product
available to the users. In the case of C, AT&T's cheap
Unix licenses certainly must have helped. However, of
all the choices which did have the good luck to get
out there, the ones which do survive well, must have some
strong contributing reasons.
I don't think AT&T did any serious marketing of C.
They just let it get out there. At least that
is my impression, since I was in the field when
C was starting to get popular -- I already knew
Fortran, Pascal, Lisp and APL before I heard
of a language called C. So I knew there were
very good personally validated reasons for me
to prefer C over, say, Pascal. Developing
multiple-module programs in Pascal could be
quite a pain. By the time somebody asked my
opinion about which language to use for a serious
product development effort, I had already had to
learn three different Pascals, with their own ways
to handle modularity and their own "use variant,
write integer, read pointer" type tricks that were
forced in systems programming. So I had no
hesitation in answering -- "C". No hype from AT&T
was required.
I am sure my personal experiences were repeated
over and over, resulting in many different
projects choosing to use C. What is more,
those who saw C projects succeeding where
others floundered, made their own conclusions.
These conclusions and successes are much
more powerful than any amount of arguments.
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