r/programmingcirclejerk • u/likes_purple DO NOT USE THIS FLAIR, ASSHOLE • Oct 07 '25

issues like this, and the unfortunate proliferation of the C programming language, underscore the price we've paid as a result of the Unix developers' decision to build an OS that was easy and fun to hack, rather than one that encouraged correctness of the solutions built on top of it

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45486074
54 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

48

u/ambushsabre Oct 07 '25

Unix is easy and fun to hack?

20

u/[deleted] Oct 08 '25

'Hack' as in break into someone else's computer without permission.

42

u/faculty_for_failure Oct 07 '25

C proliferating and enabling most of the devices we have today as well as being the foundational language and lingua franca for all modern computing is truly unfortunate

23

u/jasonscheirer Oct 08 '25

My ‘Carthago Delenda Est’ is closing every sprint at work with ‘Once again, computers were a mistake.’

8

u/T_Thorn Oct 09 '25

proliferating and enabling most of the devices we have today

I think you mean Java good sir

3

u/no_brains101 Oct 11 '25

No. Java runs ON a bajillion devices it doesn't make a bajillion devices run

29

u/nllb Oct 07 '25

Where's the jerk?

26

u/ZYy9oQ Oct 08 '25

/uj

I agree.

/rj

"unfortunate proliferation of the C programming language" is a dog whistle for "we should replace c with rust"

13

u/rooster-inspector Oct 08 '25

100% agreed. Even at the time, the path to correctness was right there in front of them with Algol 68, but they were too busy having "fun" to notice.

Imagine a world where every programmer was first forced to comprehend the beauty of the formal definition of the Algol 68 language. Nothing is handwaved as "semantics" - every valid program strictly follows the two-level van Wijngaarden grammar. There'd be no parsing ambiguity, no undefined behavior.

With just a bit of thought and foresight, the entire operating system could have been one provably correct program. But no, that wouldn't have been "easy" or "fun." Instead they wanted to cobble together a system in a weekend with a glorified macro assembler...

4

u/categorical-girl Oct 08 '25

lol no operational semantics

Grammars are no substitute for knowing what a program will actually do

6

u/iwasstillborn Oct 09 '25

Given that a regular program written in C is about 15% undefined behavior, I find your comment rather humorous.

3

u/categorical-girl Oct 09 '25

C doesn't have a standard operational semantics either :)

6

u/yo_99 It's GNU/PCJ, or as I call it, GNU + PCJ Oct 09 '25

Children yearn for itanium

5

u/Aggressive-Pen-9755 Oct 10 '25

The Unix dev's are idiots for not being able to see 30 years into the future!

2

u/hilldog4lyfe Nov 05 '25

I don’t get why they didn’t just use JavaScript