The truth about C and Unix history

by tracymaon 1/6/2015, 8:40 AMwith 77 comments

by thaumaturgyon 1/6/2015, 9:58 AM

This particular April Fool's joke goes back at least 30 years. I remember getting a chuckle out of it a long time ago.

For context for younger readers, it might be worth pointing out that there was for a while a sort of rivalry between C and Pascal adherents. C was the more "modern" and "professional" language, while Pascal was a "teaching" language (or so some of the arguments went). Windows was coded in C, while MacOS -- before it was called MacOS -- was largely Pascal, with a lot of hand-coded 68k assembly for flavor. Pascal devotees would make fun of C in about the same way that a Python programmer might make fun of Perl. C devotees responded by writing an awful lot more code than Pascal programmers did, which eventually shut them up pretty good.

Pascal got a boost out of OOP, but by 1995 or thereabouts Pascal didn't really have much of a future left, which was sort of a shame.

by las_caseson 1/6/2015, 10:19 AM

I believe that Linus Torvalds said something[1] in the spirit of this article about how Git was only adopted by the community due to how arcane it looks.

[1] http://typicalprogrammer.com/linus-torvalds-goes-off-on-linu...

by lifthrasiiron 1/6/2015, 9:35 AM

A well known hoax. For that matters, the quoted source code is a part of Carl Shapiro's submission to IOCCC 1985 [1] which produces a maze. This alone is enough for debunking the story, right?

[1] http://www.ioccc.org/1985/shapiro.c

by seiyaon 1/6/2015, 9:15 AM

I must confess that for a moment you got me there.

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/unix-hoax.html

by baroslon 1/6/2015, 10:45 AM

Wow, it's been a long time since I checked this joke for the last time! At that time I read the version that was translated into my mother tongue (Korean). Now I read this in its native form.

by UserRightson 1/6/2015, 1:23 PM

here is an interesting talk that will make you better see the doublespeak of this old hoax:

http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/31c3_-_6574_-_en_-_...

by kakakikion 1/6/2015, 9:40 AM

Heck! I so wish this is true! It would have been the prank of the century; and even the centuries to come!

by spacecowboy_lonon 1/6/2015, 9:50 AM

Now if we could all get back to using real Languages like Fortran and PL1/G :-)

by anurajon 1/6/2015, 3:03 PM

Truth is - UNIX/C and clones run the world :)