
Interview with Ken Thompson (2011) - jpelecanos
http://www.drdobbs.com/open-source/interview-with-ken-thompson/229502480
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jackyb
That last answer reminds me of my researcher colleagues :D. Are most them like
that?

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jstimpfle
Who here thinks they should have made "an object-oriented C" instead? I was
under the impression that a big part of C's success (as a lingua france /
lowest common denominator) is its minimalism. It forces only a few concepts on
its users.

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mpweiher
> "an object-oriented C" ... minimalism

That's Objective-C in a nutshell. Or was, anyway. The most minimal way to have
useful OO on C.

Of course, you could make it even simpler if you drop the "must be a superset
of C"-requirement.

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euyyn
Maybe the most minimal, but not the most efficient, and C's minimalism is only
useful because it lets you be as efficient as the hardware will be. Without
that goal, the Lisps are more minimal than both C and Objective-C.

~~~
throwawayfoo
Few people can make sense out of Lisp and fewer actually like it.

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pmoriarty
_" The language grew up with one of the rewritings of the system and, as such,
it became perfect for writing systems. ... It became the perfect language for
what it was designed to do."_

Really? Perfect? Why then are there entire books filled with "C gotchas" or "C
traps and pitfalls"?

The language is an inconsistent, inelegant, error-prone mess that has left us
with decades of serious bugs and security vulnerabilities. Yet Thompson
describes it as "perfect". Sounds like he's been letting all the prizes he got
get to his head.

Sure. The language was very influential, and much of the software we use every
day was and still is written in it. That doesn't make it perfect, just popular
-- often for legacy reasons, not because it's "perfect for writing systems".

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brianberns
C was certainly a major step forward at the time, but he does seem oblivious
to its flaws (at least in this interview). I was also disappointed to see how
he casually trashed C++ at the same time. Not very diplomatic.

~~~
pjmlp
No it wasn't, because we already had Lisp and system programming languages
like ESPOL, NEWP, PL/I, PL/M, PL/8,.... before C got released outside AT&T.

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throwawayfoo
Which tells you what?

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pjmlp
That C was certainly a major step _backwards_ at the time, only adopted thanks
to AT&T being forbiden to sell UNIX, thus deciding to offer the source code
for a nominal fee to anyone that wanted to get a license to the source code.

Or to use a more modern example, UNIX was the browser and C was JavaScript.

~~~
throwawayfoo
I never coded in the languages from your earlier post; I'd never have wanted
to either. C was and is elegant and beautiful. It isn't so popular because of
a AT&T. Look at Microsoft's power in the business world. Even with all their
"practices", .Net still hasn't been beaten by Java in terms of popularity and
widespread use. .Net is good, not saying it isn't, just so that's clear.

~~~
pjmlp
Yeah, more than 200 elegant and beautiful documented cases of UB on ANSI C11
standard.

