The truth about C and Unix history

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

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

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

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.

I learned Pascal when I was in my teens (not my first language, but the first "serious" one after Basic and LOGO) so to me it's always associated with my childish hacking attempts and very bad code IN ALL CAPS.

I remember a couple of my friends bought a C book and their code looked so cryptic and weird in comparison, so I didn't bother learning it, and then I kinda lost interest for a few years before picking up more serious programming in my 20s. In the mid-late nineties everyone was doing C++ and Java, so I never got back to Pascal. I had some good fun with it for a few years.

You could have called me a "Pascal devotee" back then, but I had eventually come to realize verbosity kills creativity and dumped Pascal for good.

This

  {
      int a[10];
      ...
  }

wins over this

  begin
    var
      A: array[0..9] of Integer;
    ...
  end;

quite simply because the latter takes longer to both read and write. The proof being that none of the more or less serious languages created in the past few decades dared to adopt e.g. begin ... end again.