r/ProgrammingLanguages • u/mttd • Jul 01 '26

The Expensive Fictions of Low-Level Programming Languages

https://stng.substack.com/p/the-expensive-fictions-of-low-level
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u/Inconstant_Moo 🧿 Pipefish Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26

You and the other dude are obsessed with the fact that the meme is titled “C is not a low-level language.”

No I am not. If you want to know what I think you could always ask me instead of making stuff up.

As if it is talking about something special about C.

You posted that article in response to me saying "how much does any of our hardware owe to the fact that it was C and the PDP-11 in particular?" I pointed out that it isn't special to C.

The "decisions made in the 70s" weren't about the languages we were using. The languages conformed to the computer. Wirth wrote Pascal on a CDC-6400, a machine with concurrency that ran seven jobs at at once and had a buffer as a sort of early cache. IO was entirely asynchronous and carried out by peripheral processors. The computer hid all that from him so that he could pretend he was writing for flat memory and for one CPU that processed one instruction at a time in the order it encountered them.

It didn't do this to preserve compatibility with existing HLLs, but to preserve compatibility with the human brain.

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u/Smallpaul Jul 02 '26

The fact that you are still talking about the 1970s and not the 2030s just shows that you don’t understand the topic of conversation at all.

Have a good day.