C — by far the most influential programming language in history
There was no such thing as a general-purpose program that was both portable across a variety of hardware and also efficient enough to compete with custom code written for just that hardware.
How silly. Everyone knew it couldn’t be done.
go on to use the world’s first portable and efficient programming language to build the world’s first portable operating system
"(\.|[^"])*" and hardware was different.But the C code was portable and fast.
C became important later, in the 1980s, because of SunNope. Its the K&R book that made C mainstream.
A C compiler could be non-portable, but C as language will be portable.The C language is far less portable than traditional high-level languages like Fortran, Algol, and Basic. These languages can run better on tagged architectures and high-level computers. C can't compile to more advanced hardware, so people stopped building it. If you're wondering why OSes have separate address spaces and no orthogonal persistence, it's because we use C.
The real point in what he said is in a way is even more powerful: C was/is good enough that basically every processor these days is a “C machine” — byte addressable, 8 bit bytes, sizeof (char *) == sizeof (int *) etc. Anybody who started programming after the early 80s probably can’t imagine programming anything else. Essentially, C fit _a lot_ of the hardware (basically, IBM-style hardware, though it was developed for the PDP-11) so people stopped building hardware that didn’t look like a PDP-11. A virtuous network effect.
Modern Unix is a catastrophe. It's the "Un-Operating System": unreliable, unintuitive, unforgiving, unhelpful, and underpowered. Little is more frustrating than trying to force Unix to do something useful and nontrivial. Modern Unix impedes progress in computer science, wastes billions of dollars, and destroys the common sense of many who seriously use it. An exaggeration? You won't think so after reading this book.
We are academics, hackers, and professionals. None of us were born in the computing analog of Ken Pier's East Africa. We have all experienced much more advanced, usable, and elegant systems than Unix ever was, or ever can be. Some of these systems have increasingly forgotten names, such as TOPS-20, ITS (the Incompatible Timesharing System), Multics, Apollo Domain, the Lisp Machine, Cedar/Mesa, and the Dorado. Some of us even use Macs and Windows boxes. Many of us are highly proficient programmers who have served our time trying to practice our craft upon Unix systems. It's tempting to write us off as envious malcontents, romantic keepers of memories of systems put to pasture by the commercial success of Unix, but it would be an error to do so: our judgments are keen, our sense of the possible pure, and our outrage authentic. We seek progress, not the reestablishment of ancient relics.