From: Travis C. Porco
Subject: Re: language marketing question, was Re: What is wrong with OO ?
Date:
Message-ID: <5d6lol$iin@agate.berkeley.edu>
In article <···········@uni.library.ucla.edu>,
Jay Martin <·······@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
>····@silicon.csci.csusb.edu (Dr. Richard Botting) writes:
>>They would have had a *real* problem.
>>At that time AT&T was forbidden to sell computer software.
>>So it was given away... and then licensed.
>>Then came the break up and the AT&T PC (believe it or not)
>It seems to me that the popularity of Unix and C came about because
>academic Computer Scientists would rather do minimal tweaks to a free
>operating system from a non-competing institution than actually
>actually do the real work of designing elegant OS's and languages.
>Thus the quick and dirty crap software for the speedy generation of
>papers becomes the industry standard. I guess any real work in this
>area of Computer Science would require cooperation and consensus which
>is impossible in an academic field because of the stress put on
>individualism and becoming the "Next Von Neumann".
>That their self serving "free lunch" actions continue to result in
>burdening the field with garbage languages (like "C") and garbage OSs
>(like "Unix") and huge numbers of incompetently trained programmers
>(As they are "too important" to teach the students software) does not
>make me look very kindly on Computer Science Academia.
Bizarre. Academic computer scientists did not design C or UNIX, of
course. If you want an elegant operating system, try Oberon, designed by
the academic idealist par excellence: Niklaus Wirth. If you want an
elegant language, try Lisp, Scheme, ML, or Icon: all academic. We cannot
blame the academics for the popularity of inelegant languages and systems.
--Travis Porco