On Getting Old

simple-talk's Database Weekly (you should subscribe) has a link to this comment-less piece on the persistence of C. Which word structure always reminds me of Dali.

[the Wiki]

I only have a couple of points to add. C dates from 1969, so is 50 years old in decadal terms; although it was sequestered to Bell Labs, more or less, for some years. COBOL is an even older language, and going strong for the same reason: billions of lines of code which would be way too expensive to re-write in PHP. And the author offers this

C is often referred to as cross platform assembly.

The way I learned it, the epithet was a tad stronger: C is the universal assembler. And not at all, really. Years before Excel there was something called Lotus 1-2-3. The first few version ran in DOS assembler, with so-called character graphics. The machines of the day were 8088 cpu, typically < 512MB, no floating point co-processor (-87), and perhaps a 5MB hard drive. Mitch decided on MS macro assembler as the language to use, since he had only enough man-years for one effort. He decided on the IBM PC as the platform, and then he had to decide on the OS and language. Gates won. And it was a blinding success. It made the IBM PC the device to have in any serious business. But, for reasons I've never bothered to track down (but fairly easy to guess), around the 4th release it was re-written in C. This was DOS 3.0. Wherever I was working, we "upgraded" from the assembler version to the C version (I doubt the powers that be had any idea), but without upgrading the machines.

Boy howdy!! What had been instant screen updates turned into the cursor slow dancing across the screen. Assembler, indeed!! Which is why any serious compute work is still done in a real assembler.