I enjoyed reading this, mostly because it made me angry, then curious, then thoughtful all in one go.
Partly because I really like the PDP-11 architecture, and it's 'separated at birth' twin the 68K, it greatly influenced me in how I think about computation. I also believe that one of the reasons that the ATMega series of 8 bit micros were so popular was that they were more amenable to a C code generator than either the 8051 or PIC architectures were.
That said, computer languages are similar to spoken languages in that a concept you want to convey can be made more easily or less easily understood by the target by the nature of the vocabulary and structure available to you.
Many useful systems abstractions, queues, processes, memory maps, and schedulers are pretty easy to express in C, complex string manipulation, not so much.
What has endeared C to its early users was that it was a 'low constraint' language, much like perl, it historically has had a fairly loose policy about rules in order to allow for a wider variety of expression. I don't know if that makes it 'low' but it certainly helped it be versatile.
Partly because I really like the PDP-11 architecture, and it's 'separated at birth' twin the 68K, it greatly influenced me in how I think about computation. I also believe that one of the reasons that the ATMega series of 8 bit micros were so popular was that they were more amenable to a C code generator than either the 8051 or PIC architectures were.
That said, computer languages are similar to spoken languages in that a concept you want to convey can be made more easily or less easily understood by the target by the nature of the vocabulary and structure available to you.
Many useful systems abstractions, queues, processes, memory maps, and schedulers are pretty easy to express in C, complex string manipulation, not so much.
What has endeared C to its early users was that it was a 'low constraint' language, much like perl, it historically has had a fairly loose policy about rules in order to allow for a wider variety of expression. I don't know if that makes it 'low' but it certainly helped it be versatile.