Could be. I think perhaps he was being intentionally nasty because there really are people who run around insisting C is "not a modern language" and it's minimalism makes it too difficult to use, and that people who don't understand this are stupid and wrong (the worst examples I've seen of this are not here BTW). You could insist to the author that the linux kernel would be better in pascal or fortran or anything, but if you did that by strongly implying he was stupid and wrong to use an unmodern impossible language, then it's not really surprising that eventually you will get a response like "even if the choice of C were to do nothing but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C".Originally Posted by Elysia
In other words, perhaps that prejudice was formed because a skilled and intelligent C++ programmer would not bother harassing the kernel people and calling them fools for not using God's chosen tool, because a skilled and intelligent person knows it ain't true. So those people could really have been producers of crap. Further, since the kernel is not in C++, all of the admirable work he dealt with daily would be in C. So it is self-reinforcing I guess. Probably some inversion of this could be applied to people who work exclusively in a C++ realm.
I think the major reason for the success of linux is together with GNU it provides an open source clone of unix. It and BSD were developed about the same time, but I believe minix was in circulation a few years before that.
@capt.jack: see what a snakepit there is here?People are freaking hilariously territorial about everything. That's what Bruce Eckel is working within, I just wanted to point that out in context. It's like political propaganda written to seduce the innocent/naive.
