On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 2:37 PM, Douglas G. Danforth <danforth{([at]})nowhere.xy
...snip...
>From that publication we find
'Outdated programming languages are still
in use today and a pithy comment made by
the famous Swiss computer scientist,
Niklaus Wirth, is appropriate in this context:
“It is indeed absolutely surprising with
which equanimity the notational monster C
was accepted by the world-wide
programmer’s community.”'
-Doug Danforth
As I recall, both C and Unix (written in C) originated with AT&T. Unix was provided at no cost to universities, so if one wanted to delve into the OS, one learned C.
Programmers tend to like and will continue to use what they know. It was an investment on AT&T's part, thinking that as computer science students moved into jobs they would bring C and Unix with them.
I remember articles in the computer press in the 1980s discussing whether the next OS would be Unix, MSDOS or the UCSD p-system (based on p-code, and running UCSD pascal, directly descended from ETH). Some of the (student) developers of the UCSD p-system went on to form a company (Modula Systems?) selling a version of Modula-2 which ran on Apple & Sage and other microcomputers,
The advent of the IBM-PC led to the ascendency of MSDOS. It came free with the computer, whereas the p-system was an option with added cost.
The question becomes which more effectively maintains and improves Linux: a legion of programmers working in one language or a much, much smaller group working in another (Oberon). If, as we believe, Oberon is superior to C, then rewriting the Linux kernel in Oberon could lead to increased interest, especially if it was demonstrably eaiser to maintain and improve.
I recall a study by IBM which showed that productivity of programmers did not scale well as the number of programmers on a project was increased. As the numbers increased, a greater and greater proportion of resources were diverted to managing and communicating within the group.
So how many Oberon programmers does it take to equal the Linux kernel development community?
--
Antony Tersol
Solex / Applied Solar Energy
831-333-1919
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Received on Tue Jan 11 2011 - 02:43:23 UTC