alt Hacker News> why C gets to be the foundation for how systems software is written.
Is there an answer here more interesting than "it's what Unix and Windows were written in, so that's how programs talked to the OS, and once you have an interface, it's impossible to change"?
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jonjacky • today at 2:09 AM
It wasn't a coincidence, or an accident. C was specifically designed to write Unix, by people who had experience with a lot of other computer languages, and had programmed other operating systems including Multics and some earlier versions of Unix. They knew exactly what they were doing, and exactly what they wanted.
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Yes and no. Clearly what you said is true, but the more profound reason is that C just minimally reflects how computers work. The rest is just convention.