C's design is probably the most post-hoc rationalized thing in the world directly after Abrahamic scripture.
"Of course the null-terminated strings of C are more low-level than the length-prefixed strings of Pascal, because the elders of C wisely designed them to be so." Alternatively, something is low-level because it works like C because C semantics have simply become the universal definition of what is thought of as low-level, regardless of machine mismatch.
Likewise, maybe it's not such a good idea that UNIXv6 or other educational unix-likes are used in operating system classes in universities. It's well-applicable, sure, but that's not the point of that education. Maybe we should use a Japanese or German clone of some IBM mainframe system instead, so that people actually get exposed to different ideas, instead of slightly simpler and less sophisticated versions of the ideas they are already familiar with. Too much unix-inbreeding in CS education isn't good.
I agree there's a teaching problem happening somewhere. I'm not sure I blame CS-education since I'd wager that most developers don't have a formal CS background.
I too regularly however come across people who believe some or all of the following:
- "Everything is ultimately just C"
- "All other languages just compile to C, so you should use it to be fast"
- "C is faster because it's closer to bare metal"
- "C is fast because it doesn't need to be interpreted unlike all other languages"
The special elevated position of C, being some kind of "ground truth" of computers is bizarre. It leads to all kinds of false-optimizations in practitioners in other languages out of some kind of misplaced confidence in the speed of C relative to all other languages.
The idea that C is "naturally faster" due to being some kind of representation of a computer that no other language could achieve is a hard myth to shake.
Especially when C advocates tend to ignore the history of systems programming languages predating the language by a decade, because the authors decided it was cooler to do their own thing, notice a similar pattern to other languages?
> Although we entertained occasional thoughts about implementing one of the major languages of the time like Fortran, PL/I, or Algol 68, such a project seemed hopelessly large for our resources: much simpler and smaller tools were called for. All these languages influenced our work, but it was more fun to do things on our own.
And using Pascal as counter example gets tiresome, not only it wasn't designed for systems programming, most of its dialects did fix those issues including its revised report (ISO Extended Pascal), by 1978 Niklaus Wirth had created Modula-2, based on Mesa (Xerox PARC replacement for their use of BCPL), both of which never had problem with string lengths.
Well it's just the common name for that particular string representation, even though it certainly existed before Pascal - just like C did not invent null-terminated strings, either.
"Of course the null-terminated strings of C are more low-level than the length-prefixed strings of Pascal, because the elders of C wisely designed them to be so." Alternatively, something is low-level because it works like C because C semantics have simply become the universal definition of what is thought of as low-level, regardless of machine mismatch.
Likewise, maybe it's not such a good idea that UNIXv6 or other educational unix-likes are used in operating system classes in universities. It's well-applicable, sure, but that's not the point of that education. Maybe we should use a Japanese or German clone of some IBM mainframe system instead, so that people actually get exposed to different ideas, instead of slightly simpler and less sophisticated versions of the ideas they are already familiar with. Too much unix-inbreeding in CS education isn't good.