Awesome, looks like my theory was completely wrong. Here's what it looks like to me, please correct me as needed. C's popularity has 2 distinct phases. 1972-1987 Unix drove C. Writing a functional PCC for a particular architecture was easy, but not unusually so compared to other languages at the time. 1987- gcc made C uniquely free to compile, so people chose to write C because it was free and already popular. Perl also came out in 1987, and afaik that was always free, but C still took off because there was so much room for multiple languages. So, now Im curious about embedded systems. In my limited experience, every "embedded system" I programmed for from 2002-2011 had C as its primary language. After 2011, I stopped programming embedded systems, so I don't know after that. Why was C so dominant in this space? Is it because adding a backend to gcc was free, C was already well known, and C was sufficiently performant? Tyler On Fri, May 22, 2020, 11:53 Tom Ivar Helbekkmo wrote: > Noel Chiappa writes: > > > I suspect the real reason for C's sucess was the nature of the language. > > When I first saw it (ca. 1976), it struck me as a quantum improvement > over > > its contemporaries. > > Paul Graham expressed it like this: > > "It seems to me that there have been two really clean, consistent > models of programming so far: the C model and the Lisp model. These > two seem points of high ground, with swampy lowlands between them." > > -tih > -- > Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance > of Lisp. Lisp is the most important idea in computer science. --Alan Kay >