M. Prasad wrote:
>
> cosc19z5@bayou.uh.edu wrote:
>
> > Let's see, C became popular for one reason only -- it was almost
> > mandatory for programming under Unix which was widespread (and
>
> When C became popular, the other major choices were Pascal, Fortran,
> Basic, and at some places, Lisp.
I think that a large factor that contributed to the C language
becomming so popular and being the language of choice for
development was due to the tremendous number of poeple that
were turned out by the colleges and universities that had
experience with C.
AT&T/Bell Labs, when they still owned Unix, did a good job of
giving away source code to educational institutions in the late
seventies and early eighties. The educational institutions
therefore had all of these free computers with source code
to the OS to use in teaching CS to their students. With C
being the language that came with the OS, not to mention
that a majority of the OS was written in C, the were somewhat
forced to teach C.
The smart compaines jumped on the C bandwagon, rightly or
wrongly, and started to produce software written in C due
to the large labor pool that had been schooled in C which
resulted in the new hires being productive almost immediately
rather than having to train them on the companies preferred
language.
Blasphemy Alert:
Cobol is the most widely used language with the greatest
number of lines of code and programmers. If any language
can be described as the best language, based on commercial
success, then Cobol is the winner hands down.
And don't try to through the Cobol is wordy and simplistic
argument around. If you take a good hard look at the programs
and how the are customarily written these days you will find
that the lines of code is a good measure to use to compare
how much code has been written for both languages.
Blasphemy Completed.
Long live Perl!
--
Bert Robbins
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