🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4kbfnf$1bu@news1.is.net> mvantassel@teambca.com (Mark VanTassel) writes:
>linden@positive.eng.sun.com (Peter van der Linden) wrote:
>
>>My personal belief is that C++ has peaked and will now go into a steady
>>decline.   But lets see some metrics proposed for measuring this.
>>Everyone's got an opinion ;-)
>
>I don't have any metrics, per se - just an observation that "C" had
>remained "king of the hill" for several decades, refusing to be budged
>by any of DOZENS of "new and improved" languages...

*several decades*?  Not really.  C was invented around 1970.  It only
existed on UNIX and a few IBM and Honeywell systems in 1975 (look at the
Bell System Technical Journal special edition on UNIX if you don't
believe me).

In the 1976 time frame, *two* decades ago, UNIX was rare, only a few
hundred installations at most, so C had penetrated to no more than a
thousand (generously) systems at that time.  Even back in those ancient
times there were tens of thousands of computer sites in industry and
universities, with C on only a few percent.

In 1976 FORTRAN and COBOL were on a much higher percentage of computer
sites than C.

C was not "king of the hill" anywhere except on UNIX before the
80s.  In my dictionary "several" is more than one and a half.

IMHO your observation of history is wrong.

Hope this throws some gasoline on the argument,
James Thiele
jet@eskimo.com
http://www.eskimo.com/~jet