@vwbusguy
And yes, Conway's Law applied (3rd bullet pt is extended variant, in talk first done in 1977. Ken+dmr were both fine computerscientists & incredsible programmers, but definitely minimalists, and with2 people doing a kernel, all that showed.
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/bsdcon/mashey_small/sld026.html
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I wonder how much of C behavior is really explained by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson either disagreeing about something or just not feeling like doing something different at the time. -
I wonder how much of C behavior is really explained by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson either disagreeing about something or just not feeling like doing something different at the time.@vwbusguy
Many decisions were of course driven by minimalism, by both ken+dmr philosophy and computer constraints. PDP-11/20: macx 56KB, shared between kernel and user (before my time). PDP-11/45 was real upgrade to 248KB max physical memory, but with real MMU allowing both kernel and users to each have 64KB I + 64KB D. Still not huge. Had they gotten PDP-10 they wanted, UNIX and C likely don’t happen:
https://techviser.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Mashey.IEEE_.Micro_.2022.pdf -
I wonder how much of C behavior is really explained by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson either disagreeing about something or just not feeling like doing something different at the time.@vwbusguy
Which specific examples did you have in mind?