

Why C Is a Great Language - StephenFalken

Alexander Stepanov, the primary designer and implementer of the C++ Standard Template Library (STL), gave an interview to Dr.Dobb's Journal back in 1995, sharing his insightful view on 'why C is a great language' (http://www.stepanovpapers.com/drdobbs-interview.html):<p>"Let's consider now why C is a great language. It is commonly believed that C is a hack which was successful because Unix was written in it. I disagree. Over a long period of time computer architectures evolved, not because of some clever people figuring how to evolve architectures---as a matter of fact, clever people were pushing tagged architectures during that period of time---but because of the demands of different programmers to solve real problems. Computers that were able to deal just with numbers evolved into computers with byte-addressable memory, flat address spaces, and pointers. This was a natural evolution reflecting the growing set of problems that people were solving. C, reflecting the genius of Dennis Ritchie, provided a minimal model of the computer that had evolved over 30 years. C was not a quick hack. As computers evolved to handle all kinds of problems, C, being the minimal model of such a computer, became a very powerful language to solve all kinds of problems in different domains very effectively. This is the secret of C's portability: it is the best representation of an abstract computer that we have. Of course, the abstraction is done over the set of real computers, not some imaginary computational devices. Moreover, people could understand the machine model behind C. It is much easier for an average engineer to understand the machine model behind C than the machine model behind Ada or even Scheme. C succeeded because it was doing the right thing, not because of AT&#38;T promoting it or Unix being written with it."
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CyberFonic
C is a great language in the sense that a F1 racing car is a great car. C's
minimalism and portability gives great power but with it comes great
responsibility to use it properly. Just like you wouldn't give grandma the
keys to the F1 to go to the shopping mall.

C is a great language to write an operating system and its utilities in. But
that doesn't make it suitable to write an ERP system.

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daven11
It's not that C is a great language imho - it's the C tool chain - I can
compile a c program on _anything_ (except the coming windows 8 tablets - but
I'm guessing it's a matter of time)

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PopaL
The interview is from 1995 ... you should probably mention this in the title
of your link.

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userulluipeste
What changed in these matters since then?

