Interview with Ken Thompson (2011)
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Interview with Ken Thompson (2011)
1–10 of 29 posts
Re: Interview with Ken Thompson (2011)
#2Who here thinks they should have made "an object-oriented C" instead? I was under the impression that a big part of C's success (as a lingua france / lowest common denominator) is its minimalism. It forces only a few concepts on its users.
Re: Interview with Ken Thompson (2011)
#3Who here thinks they should have made "an object-oriented C" instead? I was under the impression that a big part of C's success (as a lingua france / lowest common denominator) is its minimalism. It forces only a few concepts on its users.
Not sure if it was used in Stuxnet, but an OOC compiler already exists [1] :)
Re: Interview with Ken Thompson (2011)
#4That last answer reminds me of my researcher colleagues :D. Are most them like that?
Re: Interview with Ken Thompson (2011)
#5Who here thinks they should have made "an object-oriented C" instead? I was under the impression that a big part of C's success (as a lingua france / lowest common denominator) is its minimalism. It forces only a few concepts on its users.
A big part of C's success was being a requirement for UNIX systems programming, with 80's startups (Sun, SGI,...) adopting an almost free of charge OS, with source code available, for their workstations.
Re: Interview with Ken Thompson (2011)
#6Who here thinks they should have made "an object-oriented C" instead? I was under the impression that a big part of C's success (as a lingua france / lowest common denominator) is its minimalism. It forces only a few concepts on its users.
> "an object-oriented C" ... minimalism
That's Objective-C in a nutshell. Or was, anyway. The most minimal way to have useful OO on C.
Of course, you could make it even simpler if you drop the "must be a superset of C"-requirement.
Re: Interview with Ken Thompson (2011)
#7"The language grew up with one of the rewritings of the system and, as such, it became perfect for writing systems. ... It became the perfect language for what it was designed to do."
Really? Perfect? Why then are there entire books filled with "C gotchas" or "C traps and pitfalls"?
The language is an inconsistent, inelegant, error-prone mess that has left us with decades of serious bugs and security vulnerabilities. Yet Thompson describes it as "perfect". Sounds like he's been letting all the prizes he got get to his head.
Sure. The language was very influential, and much of the software we use every day was and still is written in it. That doesn't make it perfect, just popular -- often for legacy reasons, not because it's "perfect for writing systems".
Re: Interview with Ken Thompson (2011)
#8"The language grew up with one of the rewritings of the system and, as such, it became perfect for writing systems. ... It became the perfect language for what it was designed to do." Really? Perfect? Why then are there entire books filled with "C gotchas" or "C traps and pitfalls"? The language is an inconsistent, inelegant, error-prone mess that has left us with decades of serious bugs and security vulnerabilities.…
C was certainly a major step forward at the time, but he does seem oblivious to its flaws (at least in this interview). I was also disappointed to see how he casually trashed C++ at the same time. Not very diplomatic.
Re: Interview with Ken Thompson (2011)
#9Who here thinks they should have made "an object-oriented C" instead? I was under the impression that a big part of C's success (as a lingua france / lowest common denominator) is its minimalism. It forces only a few concepts on its users.
> "an object-oriented C" ... minimalism That's Objective-C in a nutshell. Or was, anyway. The most minimal way to have useful OO on C. Of course, you could make it even simpler if you drop the "must be a superset of C"-requirement.
Thus Swift.
Re: Interview with Ken Thompson (2011)
#10"The language grew up with one of the rewritings of the system and, as such, it became perfect for writing systems. ... It became the perfect language for what it was designed to do." Really? Perfect? Why then are there entire books filled with "C gotchas" or "C traps and pitfalls"? The language is an inconsistent, inelegant, error-prone mess that has left us with decades of serious bugs and security vulnerabilities.…
I didn't read "perfect" in the same way. He just seems to be saying that it was developed in parallel with the OS, and so was tweaked to fit the needs of OS development at the time.
I read it more as "purpose built", and therefore, better than anything else that was available to him.