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Computer Languages Form an Ecosystem

(This is a copy of an article I posted on slashdot on March 15th, in response to a discussion titled C Alive and Well Thanks to Portable.NET. Many posters argued that the C language is dead. I add my response here, because one month after its original slashdot submission, I am still getting web site hits from it.)

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Technological Complexity

As a child I used to be able to assemble and disassemble my bike; the most sophisticated artefact I owned. I could understand the working of its (simple) gear system, the functioning of the brakes, the assembly of its ball-bearings.

As a teen I had a reasonably complete understanding of the IBM-PC I used. I knew the 8088 processor's complete instruction set, the instruction encoding details, the pinout and operation of the ISA bus and the Centronics and RS-232 interfaces, the operation of the 6845 video controller and the 4164 memory chips, all the BIOS calls, all the MS-DOS commands and system calls, and the complete details Basic and C programming languages I programmed in. I also knew the principles of operation behing the processes used to build the computer's chips, the MFM recording format used by the hard disk, and the operation of the CRT monitor.

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